Nowadays, a successful shopping and entertainment centre concept supposes not only broad diversity of shopping, entertainment, and recreation areas, but also a unique idea of building design.
Expressive appearance, created with the help of new materials and unique facade solutions, is an important component of success for a shopping and entertainment centre. According to expert assessment, memorable architecture of a shopping and entertainment centre attracts 15-25% more visitors and enables the building owner to raise the rent rates by 10-25%, and thus during project design, developers pay special attention to creation of a shopping and entertainment centre concept. More and more often facade lighting is used as separate elements or perforated illuminated facades, thus allowing to draw extra visitors’ attention at night time.
At the same time, the issue of cost-saving for project operation remains relevant, thus causing implementation of energy-saving technologies already at the stage of the design. To gain high energy-saving characteristics for a building, investors normally use sandwich panels as the most affordable and energy-efficient solution, which may, however, limit the architectural variability of the architecture of a shopping and entertainment centre.
A unique example of construction innovations, when the developer of a project in Ukraine united various technologies – ventilated facade and sandwich panels (Ruukki Forma system), is the 120 thousand m2 Retroville shopping and entertainment centre recently opened in Kyiv.
High air-tightness and energy efficiency of the building envelope enable not only creation of comfortable microclimate for visitors, but also considerable cost-saving on heating and cooling, the latter being often comparable with heating costs, and thus sandwich panels were used in the design. Curtain walling with various cladding was applied on top of sandwich panels to make the shopping and entertainment centre more architectural expression.
The design stipulated fixing several types of cladding materials having weight of up to 40 kg/m2, as well as advertisement and media boards up to 90 kg/m2 to the external lining of sandwich panels.
The most energy-efficient sandwich panels of Energy series by Ruukki, of a trendy graphite colour, were used as wall structures, allowing to reduce the building’s energy loss by 20%, compared to the traditional panels available on the Ukrainian market. The external lining thickness is 0.6 mm, the high density of the core, and excellent glue adhesion in such panels enable fixing facade claddings to them, with maximum acceptable load onto lining of up to 90 kg/m2. After erection of sandwich panels, decorative elements in the form of steel lamellas as well as composite, ceramic granite, and HPL panels were installed on the walls of Retroville.
For convenience of shopping and entertainment visitors, the design envisaged a broad 3,700 m2 canopy along the front part of the building, ensuring comfort in the entrance areas in case of bad weather. To make such a massive structure slender, a combination of continuous and perforated Ruukki design panels alternating chequerwise, was used. Such a solution allowed the structure to be perceived as light, as well as created a noise-absorbing screen, which improved the acoustic comfort near the shopping and entertainment centre.
One of the project requirements was the need to arrange universal fixing locations on the facade for installation of advertisement boards without cold bridging. This task was resolved through application of special nylon sleeves with non-connected bolts and metal rails with quadruple fixing points.
To allow daylight into the internal space of the shopping and entertainment centre, in the course of construction it was decided to arrange a translucent dome of 2 thousand m2 in the roof. This led to possible formation of snow bags with huge load onto the roof – up to 1.1 tons/m2 onto a 6 m span, and thus the need for expensive strengthening of the building frame. Rauta prepared an additional design for strengthening the roof around the dome, using the T153 bearing trapezoid profile of high-strength steel of S350 grade 1.5 mm thick, thus considerably reducing the project budget and construction timing.
The high interest of visitors and high occupancy by tenants confirmed that the concept for the Retroville shopping and entertainment centre had been chosen correctly. The project demonstrated that facade solutions of sandwich panels may be energy-efficient, beautiful, and functional.