20 Aug A bit of a Marathon!
We’ve been busily working on the 11th floor of Marathon House – the original building built for the Burmah Oil Company on façade repairs following a fire.
This complicated panelised system stacked from the bottom upwards meant we need to cut out the damaged section and adapt new window profiles without affecting the adjoining façade. If that wasn’t complicated enough, we needed to take samples of all the different original aluminium sections, about 18 in total and have new dies made to re-extrude the aluminium profiles to fabricate the new frames!
Just to throw in another complication, the glass spandrel panels were uniquely coloured to match Burmah Oil’s logo and incorporate a myriad of tiny pyramids to change colours as the sun moves across them!
We colour-matched as near as possible and then needed to work out how to install.
The frames were lifted into position then partly glazed in situ. Given the textured relief of the glass, we couldn’t use glass vacuum lifters and as there was no existing structural information on the building, we designed a way to fit lightweight scaffold on the roof to suspend temporary cradles with low-level scaffolding landing deck bridged over the adjacent buildings!!
Certainly a marathon this and one of the most difficult, yet intriguing, projects we’ve worked on. However, all goes to shows how accomplished Structura is on tackling the most challenging of tasks!
