The Tasigo hotel facade has a complete wood finish, this presented several difficulties which were all overcome by intelligent material choices.
Project Data
| Location | Eskisehir, Turkey |
| Owner | Polimeks A.S. |
| Architect | GAD Architecture |
Material Choice
Solid wood has become fashionable in construction however it is subject to aging due to time and environmental factors, causing deformations. Technowood products are made by applying wood veneers to durable materials; this approach prevents unpredictable bending and deformation.
Technowood can be used where traditional wood products can but also where specific details and measurements make the use of other wood products difficult. They are easy to assemble and be produced to specification.
An example of a facade system using Technowood profiles
Fire Insulation
In buildings over 21.5m, A2 class fire-rated panels made from non-combustible materials are required by European Union standards. This is especially necessary since the finish of the hotel façade is 100% wood. Using Technowood materials with their A-class fire rating solved the problem without compromising design.
Maintenance
The hotel façade uses more than 50 kilometers of profiles and 15000 sqm of panels. If the whole project had been made out of solid wood, yearly maintenance which could only be performed during dry periods and would have taken three months to complete would have become a burden and caused the closure of the hotel every summer.
In contrast to traditional wood, Technowood only requires maintenance every five years and it is easy and quick to do.
Supply & Production Period
Gathering the required amount of teak materials in itself is a problem and takes time since nobody has 6670 m3 Raw Teak wood in stock. Just sourcing the wood would have probably taken at least as much time as it took to finish the whole project using Technowood
Environmental Impact
In the construction industry, wood is often harvested from trees which take almost 100 years to mature, sustainable forestry is now widely practiced however does not take into account the unpredictability of wood consumption levels 100 years from now. This is why Technowood has paired sustainable forestry practices in line with FSC guidelines with their revolutionary method of applying natural wood veneers to durable materials; thus also addressing the issue of high consumption.
Using veneers reduces the consumption of wood by 98% and increases its life expectancy by more than 5 times. For 6670 m3 Teak material, 22234 trees would have to be cut down. That means a minimum of 13,9 Hectares (nearly 14 Football Fields) of a Teak tree forest. Using Technowood, the architect only needed 143 m3 Teak wood; equivalent to nearly 477 trees. Meaning that for this particular project, the use of Technowood has saved 21.757 Trees and a forest area of 13,6 Hectares.
