The Environmentally Responsible Choice
Louver Maneuver
Historic pier gets a breath of fresh air
Historic Broadway Pier in San Diego, CA, with its cruise ships full of happy tourists enjoying the year round sunshine, salty sea breeze, palm trees and lights of beautiful San Diego in the distance is the perfect gateway to an ocean adventure. Enjoying the gentle sea breeze within the beautifully renovated cruise terminal is thanks to a cleverly created set of louvers, designed into the building.
Maximum airflow, protection from the elements, design freedom, sustainability – just some of the performance requirements the architectural world wants for a building’s louvers. Louvers are called upon to be many things; Storm Resistant, Extreme Weather Resistant, Drainable and Non-drainable, Acoustical, Operating, Blast-Resistant, Bold Line, Sight Proof…the list goes on.
As this list demonstrates, as well as ventilation, protection is essential. Whether that protection is in the form of protecting a building’s inner mechanisms from disruption, or delivering high performance exterior weatherability and durability via a sustainable coating, protection is important.
They also have to look good. Actually, not just good, great, and if those same, hardworking, great looking louvers can also bring an additional level of sustainable design to a project, surely it’s a done deal?
The freedom to design buildings without restrictions based around louver capability is something Construction Specialties brings to architects all over the world. Defying traditional airflow design convention, viewing ventilation as an opportunity rather than a restriction, creating louvers that are a design feature or melt unobtrusively into the building façade – anything is possible - and all without sacrificing performance.
Construction Specialties is a well-respected name in the architectural industry, delivering quality building product solutions that meet the needs of architects, engineers, designers, building owners, facility managers and contractors, and ensuring everyone’s design, maintenance, and safety goals are achieved. IFS high performance, architectural grade powder coatings deliver world class protection and aesthetics to Construction Specialties louvers.
Performance powder coatings deliver the highest levels of protection, in the form of awesome scratch resistance, durability and weatherability, not to mention the improved sustainability benefits IFS performance architectural coatings bring to any project, compared with liquid paint. Hard working protection and a more environmentally responsible choice? Absolutely.
Environmental design is an essential part of any project today, and environmentally responsible products and environmentally responsible partners are at the heart of both Construction Specialties and IFS Coatings. So combined, they help deliver improved environmental performance wherever they are used.
Each product in IFS Coatings’ range of architectural coatings automatically comes with an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and is listed with Mindful Materials. Construction Specialties louvers supply buildings with product options that contribute to LEED® certifications, mindful MATERIALS, Cradle to Cradle® Certified products, and many more programs. A powder coated louver for ventilation, protection and improved environmental impact? No problem.
Back to Broadway Pier. Constructed in 1919, the pier has seen some important visitors, including the U.S. Navy, the region’s fishing fleet, cruise ships and the royal yacht in 1983. When a renovation was on the cards achieving an environmentally friendly design that also achieved LEED certification (Gold) was essential.
Construction Specialties powder coated louvers in Arabian Blue on all elevations were installed to allow fresh air to circulate and sea breezes to enter the beautiful building. Of course, that year round Californian sunshine, and warm salty breeze enjoyed by millions of tourists every year, can also play havoc with metal substrates. This is where IFS performance powder coating steps in to deliver incredible weatherability in the form of UV protection from fade and corrosion resistance. In fact IFS 500FP will meet and exceed the strict performance requirements of AAMA 2605, and thus delivers durability and then some. Of course, it also delivers an improved sustainability footprint that no other type of performance coating can come close to.
In fact, environmental credentials were extremely important to the renovation team at Broadway Pier, making Construction Specialties and IFS Coatings a great combination. As well as the incredible louver system, more than 93 percent of construction debris was recycled, greater than 20 percent of the total building materials contain recycled content and a 60 kW solar panel system, which offsets at least 28 percent of the building’s energy needs was used. Water efficient fixtures were installed and a shore power system, that provides power to cruise vessels from the electrical grid, allowing them to shut off their engines, reduces ship air emissions.
Impressive stuff, and when a building is being created with environmental responsibility in mind, switching to high performance coatings for curtain wall, façade, windows, doors, and of course Construction Specialties Louvers, is simple.