Best in Class
Situated just steps from the campus of Purdue University, Hub State Street is an upscale apartment complex for university students that offers a broad array of amenities. Residents enjoy furnished units along with access to a fitness center, a yoga and meditation studio, a spa with a sauna, and a rooftop sundeck with a pool and hot tub. The complex is within minutes of West Lafayette’s best shopping and dining.
During planning and construction for the project, architects and construction crews faced an aggressive schedule and a host of challenges that made prefabrication with Sto Panel Technology® the optimal solution for the building’s façade.
Hitting the Mark
The construction site for The Hub had a small footprint in a dense urban area with active city streets on two sides, leaving little room for a laydown area or scaffolding. From an installation standpoint, each individual apartment required multiple penetrations in terms of the building’s external cladding. Moreover, crews were working on a strict deadline to complete the project since students renting apartments in the building had been given specific move-in dates.
Antunovich Associates, the architect on the project, ultimately chose prefabrication as the preferred approach for the building’s exterior cladding. They specified StoPanel® Classic ci, StoSignature® Brick, and Stolit® 1.5 to replicate both a brick and corrugated metal appearance, thereby delivering a modern, sophisticated look for the façade.
Workers fabricated and waterproofed 430 external panels in a controlled manufacturing facility to provide for the highest-quality building envelope. A small crew then installed all the panels using one central tower crane, collapsing the time frame for completion and minimizing disruption on the busy college campus.
Aesthetic Appeal and Durability
Prefabrication with Sto Panel Technology creates a platform for efficiency and higher-quality output, reducing project risk without compromising on façade aesthetics. StoPanel® finished exterior wall panels give architects the freedom to make their mark while delivering a verifiable formula for saving time and money on a project.
With the Hub, architects sought a multi-cladding appearance for the exterior walls with a combination of brick and corrugated metal panels. This was achieved with a StoPanel® Classic ci system utilizing a StoSignature® Impression Brick technique and a Stolit® textured finish, providing an integrated solution that delivered the desired aesthetics and performance characteristics.
StoSignature Brick gives architects a wide variety of customizable colors, sizes, and textures, making it easy to achieve a timeless aesthetic surface. For this project, skilled craftsmen applied brick stencils to the panels in a factory setting to ensure the appearance was of high quality and delivered the look of real brick.
The corrugated metal appearance was created by making precise cuts into the EPS foam, thereby replicating the indentation in a metal panel. To complete the desired appearance, applicators used Sto Base Coat; reinforcing mesh; and Stolit textured finish, a ready-mixed, acrylic-based, premium exterior wall finish.
Sitting behind the external cladding, the StoPanel Classic ci system includes continuous insulation and a StoGuard® waterproof air barrier for energy efficiency and durability.
The combined Sto solutions resulted in an integrated, lighter-weight external cladding system versus traditional brick and metal. Moreover, complex transitions between the brick and metal façade aesthetics were eliminated since the project used the same system underneath the exterior panels.
Using traditional construction methods, the same job might have taken six to eight months.
Welcome Home
Rather than six to eight months to complete the job, it took 68 days to install the StoPanel solution, and The Hub welcomed its first tenants in the summer of 2019.
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