Category: Construction

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Brise Soleil: Functional, Beautiful and Eco-friendly

In today’s world, architects are becoming more and more fond of using large expanses of glass in their designs, especially in industrial buildings. This creates a striking facade, however, these buildings can be prone to overheating and lack of ventilation. This is where external louvres can prove a wonderful asset. These ventilating features consist of wooden, aluminium or glass slats placed periodically down the side of a building in order to encourage circulation of fresh air.

Glass louvres are especially popular in big cities or other heavily populated areas, where the air is polluted, or in excessively hot or cold climates.

Many people walking past a building which has external louvres installed will not realize their practical advantages, as louvres can be so aesthetically pleasing that they can be mistaken for a mere design feature with no useful function. However, louvres not only function as ventilation features or temperature control, they can also be used to keep sand from entering a building, as well as preventing noise pollution.

For larger buildings, or buildings frequented by the public, such as museums or galleries, architects often choose brise soleil. French for ‘sunbreakers’€™, these features reduce heat gain within a building by controlling the amount of sunlight that penetrates the (often glass) walls. They have the added advantage of shading visitors around the building from sunlight or rain.

The structure of brise soleil vary wildly from one project to the next, but typically they consist of a horizontal projection made of steel. Some structures are much more complex, however, with architect Jean Nouvel designing an elaborate facade of multi-layered patterns evocative of ancient Islamic screens on his Burj Qatar skyscraper. Structures can also be made to move with the sun: for example, the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum includes a wing-like structure that opens during the day to shade visitors from the head, and closes at night. These dramatic brise soleil are wonderful examples of how function and design can combine to create iconic buildings that are highly practical in their conception.

Obviously, one of the main advantages of louvres is temperature control, and this is why they are so well respected as eco-friendly features. In fact, glass louvres don’t just deflect excess heat, they actually absorb it, retaining it to be released to heat the building in the winter. In this way, louvres are capable of helping to regulate a building’s heat, from cool in summer to warm in winter. External louvres can even be integrated with solar energy, as they are perfectly positioned to house delicate solar panels.

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Maple Sunscreening: a maker of glass louvres that don’t cost the earth

When it comes to judging the environmental impact of your offices; as well as thinking about costs of heating and air conditioning, one consideration that many managers often overlook is the way that shade and sunlight are used outside the building. The environmental – and financial – impact of keeping a building hot or cool can be significant. In fact, it can be one of an organisation’s single biggest outlays. Add in the costs of protecting it from degradation caused by the elements, and it becomes clear that old-fashioned bricks and mortar, and straightforward solutions like central heating or air conditioning aren’t enough: more subtle approaches are required. Since 1983, Maple Sunscreening has offered a way of turning the elements from foe to friend, by harnessing them to your advantage.

Intelligently-placed elements like brise soleils, glass louvres and other external louvres can help you make the most out of the natural heating and cooling that the weather offers, by organising shade and sunlight intelligently. A strategically-placed glass louvre can improve airflow and rain defence simultaneously; on the other hand, an opaque external louvre on a roof can improve the rain-resistance of a building while masking unsightly rooftop plant, for a better appearance. And a brise soleil is a perfect tool for strategically creating shaded zones around the outside of your windows, to keep rooms at a desirable temperature and prevent them from baking in the sun!

Placing external louvres and other structures optimally can be a complex business, and the technical complexity of the undertaking can often seem daunting. But Maple Sunscreening have the expertise and the wherewithal to make it… a breeze!

Maple Sunscreening know that selecting, designing and installing the right external louvre or brise soleil can be highly technically demanding. But their service is organised in such a way as to provide the maximum local, personalised assistance as possible. Maple Sunscreening is divided into regional offices, and it handles its clients on a regional basis, to make sure that you are given the maximum support from start to finish. Maple Sunscreening offers a rounded package of support, with dedicated teams who can help you every step of the way, from conceiving and designing the product your building needs, to producing it in their own workshop, to installing it. An ethical company, they are dedicated to explaining every stage in the process honestly and straightforwardly – their aim is to do business while maximising the energy efficiency of buildings in the UK, not to bamboozle clients into ordering unnecessary works.Â

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Glass louvres in a whole array of different sizes, colours and styles

Buildings that are excessively hot or cold are not only uncomfortable, they can also be a risk to the environment and expensive to keep going. It is therefore important to consider how cases of overheating, or a lack of insulation might be addressed. The erection of sunscreening devices is one of several remedial options. Brise soleil, for instance, stop direct sunshine from entering buildings. An excellent alternative to air conditioning, which can leave us dried out and thirsty, brise soleil can be cut using reflective glass that at once lessens glare and increases privacy. glass louvres offer another solution that meets the demands of green policies with style; usually erected as additions to existing buildings, they can be made using bespoke coloured glass and can even be run solely on solar power. External louvres are then a third way of making buildings more energy efficient and keeping customers and employees happy on your premises.

So, if a workplace is unaired and inhospitable, any one, or a blend of the above solutions might quite quickly rebalance the temperature and air quality while also saving money and supporting eco-friendly ideas. Company directors, or leaders with a part to play in the well-being of employees have a responsibility to make offices, meeting rooms and other areas both pleasant to inhabit and conducive to work. In brief, an uncomfortable professional whose mind is caught up on keeping warm or staying cool is not going to be a happy one, nor, in all probability, will his or her work be up to scratch.

Indeed, the atmosphere of a workplace should be prized in much the same way by a respectable company as any more conventional asset would be. Therefore, if your building needs to be cooler, look into getting a brise soleil. If you need more room but want to use space efficiently and heat economically, why not invest in a glass louvre? And if you require some extra shading from the outside, external louvres can help. Quite simply, the reputation and the image of your brand is at stake every time visitors enter your building: first impressions of the business will be based not just on documentation but on the happiness of the people met and the surroundings that contribute to their outlook.

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External louvre allow the effects of sunscreens to alter according to the season

When carrying out a new construction job, one factor which can have an extremely large effect on the final success of the building job is the choice of sunscreening. Many architects are trained to take into account the difficulties that can develop from direct and powerful sunlight falling on a building and to put some form of sunscreening into their plans. There are a range of methods which are used to screen buildings, ranging from plain aluminium curtains to give shade from the summer sun to the patterned concrete walls popularised by Le Corbusier in the first half of the twentieth century. The architectural expression for these mechanisms for providing sunscreening is a brise soleil. Frequently external louvre will be incorporated into the design of the sunscreen in order to permit the effect of the sunscreening to alter with the seasons.

Brise soleil is a French term (the plural is brises soleils) which means ‘sun breaker’. These are most usually found, and most necessary, on buildings where the facades are made from large amounts of glass. During the summer the rooms enclosed by these glass walls can overheat terribly because of the fierce summer sun. The form of sunscreen most commonly used by architects these days is a horizontal projection from the sunside façade of a new building. Often louvres are incorporated into the design which will obstruct the high-angle summer sun from falling on the building, but will permit the low angle winter sun to hit the building’s façade in order to offer some passive solar heating.

Sometimes architects chose to use external contractors to design and manufacture sunscreening. Such companies can design both internal and external sunscreens and also manufacture them. Designs can vary in colour and material and the architects are able to specify certain aspects of the sunscreens’ design in their briefs, such as requesting they provide maximum privacy for users of the building.

A brise soleil or aluminium curtain is becoming an increasingly common sight on many new buildings often with external louvre giving an interesting pattern of light and dark to their outer walls. An exceptional example of this is the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (designed by Jean Nouvel) where the brise soleil has motor controlled apertures filtering and controlling the sunlight that falls on the building and breaking it up into geometric motifs. The building won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and is one of the cultural reference points of Paris. It is well worth seeing.

Please visit http://www.maplesunscreening.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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