Originally built in the 1970’s, the monolithic Richmond City Hall in Richmond, Virginia, featured marble panels, but due to adverse climatic effects, began to crack by the 1990’s. The new City Hall combines the traditional beauty of granite with a modern painted aluminum curtain wall system that puts an emphasis on it’s “grid-like appearance.” The aluminum curtain wall panels use Akzo Nobel’s high performance Interpon D3000 coating with Lumiflon FEVE fluoropolymer resins; which have proven to provide gloss and ultraviolet degradation resistance in excess of 10 years.
The Richmond City Hall uses 12,000 square feet of aluminum panels supplied by The Pohl Group, a German-based fabricator. These panels feature Akzo Nobel’s Interpon D3000 powder coating in beige that is applied and cured at the coater’s site with very controlled parameters. Other than installation of the curtain wall system, no coating work was necessary. With added durability and weatherability from the Lumiflon resins in the Interpon coating, the life-cycle costs associated with recoating and maintenance are lower compared to other metal coating systems.
LUMIFLON®, a product of the Asahi Glass Company, is a fluoropolymer resin that offers distinct advantages to the architectural market. LUMIFLON® provides architects with the option of using brighter colors and higher gloss, allowing gloss values as high as 90; offers the flexibility to be heat cured or cured at ambient temperature, giving fabricators a choice between shop application or application in the field; and can be used successfully on a number of materials, including steel, aluminum, fiberglass, concrete and polycarbonate for 30 years without fading.
AkzoNobel Powder Coatings; Sassenheim, Netherlands, is the largest global manufacturer of powder coatings and a leader in powder coatings technology, manufacturing at over 29 factories around the world.
Images and information courtesy of © Akzo Nobel.