Spanish company Alpesa reforms La Seine Musicale in Paris and offers a sustainable design thanks to its cardboard rings

News Infurma07/03/2018
Spanish company Alpesa reforms La Seine Musicale in Paris and offers a sustainable design thanks to its cardboard rings
Spanish company Alpesa reforms La Seine Musicale in Paris and offers a sustainable design thanks to its cardboard rings

Mandriladora Alpesa is a company that manufactures mandrels, tubes and rings of cardboard and has a production of 32,000 tons per year, which makes it the largest manufacturer in the Peninsula, with a market share of approximately 17%. Its main factory is located in the Valencian town of Tavernes de la Valldigna, although it has offices in Barcelona and Cordoba from which it serves the entire Peninsula. After more than 25 years of experience and innovation in the sector, and under the premises of closeness and flexibility with any type of customer, Alpesa closed the year of 2016 with a turnover of 22 million euros and 130 employees.

The company has distributed a total of 28,156 cardboard rings of different diameters, which have been manufactured with a special paper retardant paper for the new sustainable icon of Paris, La Seine Musicale. The rings, which were commissioned by the company Frapont, in charge of all the internal lining in wood of the audotirium, have also had a special varnish in kraft cardboard. The nearly 30,000 rings that make up the 900 hexagons of four different dimensions create a suspended ceiling that lets the sound pass and amplifies it naturally.

This ceiling forms part of the interior of the auditorium and of a building that has been designed by the Japanese architect, - and winner of the Pritzker of international architecture 2014 -, Shigeru Ban, and the French Jean de Gastines.

La Seine Musicale is a cultural and sustainable icon of Paris, built along the Seine, west of the French capital, in the town of Boulagne-Billancourt, with more than 1,000 m2 of photovoltaic solar panels. The building was the historic headquarters of Renault, from 1929 to 1992. In it, Shigeru Ban, known for his history in humanitarian architecture when constructing buildings and shelters of paper and cardboard, after numerous earthquakes such as Kobe, Turkey, India or Port Prince, “wanted to make a nod to this type of architecture“, explains the director of the Project in Frapont, Laura Navarro.

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The process to find the right material to develop these rings, which combine the two technical requirements of the architect, the fire resistance in a cardboard material and the color - kraft cardboard - has led both companies to carry out numerous tests in the factory and in situ.

First, find the paper that allowed to achieve the desired product, with sufficient fire resistance. Secondly, achieve the manufacturing with this material, that was different from the one that Alpesa usually produces, mainly due to the composition of the paper and its behavior with the tails. Thus, tests were made with various base papers, and combinations of tails to get finishes of the appropriate aesthetic quality. But they could not be validated until they had the results of the fire tests.

Subsequently, Frapont varnished the pieces in a complicated process. “The paper with which they were made was very porous and soaked a lot of water to resist the fire, which made it very difficult to finish the pieces with maximum delicacy, underlines Laura Navarro, project director at Frapont. Finally, the pieces were punched and assembled with rivets to form the hexagons. In this sense, the CEO of Mandriladora Alpesa, Javier Altur, explains that “it has been a project with a high technical component and for which we had to have the maximum involvement of the staff, but the result has been very satisfactory

Source: Alpesa
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