Projects

Take a look at the many projects that have benefited from stainless steel.

Our portfolio includes everything from the latest trends in everyday buildings to some of the world’s most aesthetically daring designs.

The forested shores of Lake Memphremagog

Stainless Steel Roof Reflects the Surrounding Environment and the Home’s Sustainable Vision

A lakefront house in Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Québec is a dynamic, welcoming, and friendly sight along the forested shores of Lake Memphremagog. The residential home was designed in 2020 by NatureHumaine, a Montreal-based architecture and design firm that drew its inspiration from nearby churches, including a Benedictine abbey.

The home also pulls from its natural surroundings. For example, the envelope of the multi-tiered upper floor is made of pre-aged wood siding and topped by a stainless steel roof clad with Aperam’s Uginox Patina K41. Over time, the stainless steel roof, which is punctuated by big bright skylights, will gain a nice matte appearance that will tie the home and landscape together.

But the decision to use stainless steel goes beyond just aesthetics. As a durable material, stainless steel can withstand the elements and, unlike other roofing materials, is guaranteed a long lifespan. And, being 100% recyclable, using stainless steel ensures that the house contributes to protecting the beautiful environment it calls home – a mission further enhanced by the property’s use of geothermal heating, insulation that exceeds code requirements, charging stations for electric vehicles, and a choice of energy-efficient lighting.

Technical Files

Québec, Canada
NatureHumaine
©©Adrien Williams

Info

K41
Patina

St Barnabas Church

The £5m restoration of Grade II listed St Barnabas Church Erdington after an arson attack in 2007 included a sweeping stainless steel roof. This has enabled the modern extension to be ‘fused’ with the extensively restored Victorian structure to incorporate a glass fronted cafeteria.

Architects Brownhill Hayward Brown specified a standing seam system using Aperam Uginox and Ugitop stainless steel across the entire span. UGINOX takes on the matt grey appearance and traditional aesthetic of aged lead sheet through natural patination. UGITOP was installed to the overhanging soffit areas where natural ageing through weather was restricted, the material also being easy to clean.

The stainless steel roof’s has been described as ‘providing a modern twist in the creation of a place of worship fit for the 21st century’.

Technical Files

Erdington – Birmingham, United Kingdom
Brownhill Hayward Brown
©Terence Smith Photography

Info

304/1.4301
Uginox Top

Island Pavilion

The new island pavilion and footbridge, completed in June 2014, are located at the centre of Wormsley Estate, a pastoral landscape on a grand scale at the heart of the Chiltern Hills, close to Oxford.

Conceived in the English classical tradition of a pavilion in the landscape, the project re-interprets the 18th Century tradition for the 21st Century and follows on from our adjacent Opera Pavilion, completed in 2011. The Island Pavilion, Wormsley House and Garsington Opera House form a landscape group of “Pavilions in the Park”. The Island Pavilion will be used for entertaining during the summer months of opera, including dining, receptions, art exhibition and musical recitals and has been designed as a container to house a stainless steel sculpture by Jeff Koons entitled, “Cracked Egg (Blue)”.

This project completes the architectural composition and aims to integrate architecture, design and art within a protected English landscape.

Site Location:

Wormsley is located on the Oxfordshire / Buckinghamshire border and extends to approximately 1,000 hectares of woodland and farmland. It is an established historic country estate with easy access from both Oxford and London, which is only 35 miles away.

The site is on an island in the centre of a lake, surrounded by open parkland which is viewed from Wormsley House and the Opera Pavilion. It creates the architectural focus for 360 degree views from around the Estate.

The Design Concept: The Pavilion is planned and located to maximise panoramic views outwards across the landscape. It is set-out along classical lines with its main entrance beneath a portico, a two metre wide overhanging canopy running the length of the building, which provides shade to the facade, and gives access to the Main Room. All service spaces such as the kitchen, plant room and bathroom facilities are positioned to the rear on the plan along the western elevation. The structural form has been designed to express the plan layout, with the main structural supports and roof cantilevering from the western edge of the building. There is no external lighting: The Pavilion becomes a light fitting at night, lit from within by an illuminated acoustically transparent ceiling, or upside down light box. It acts as a lantern in the landscape when glimpsed from The House and by the opera pavilion audience at the end of a

performance.

The new bridge ‘skims’ the surface of the lake with minimum impact when viewed from the surrounding landscape. It is designed as an extruded plane, held above the surface of the water by a concealed steel structure and illuminated from below, filtering light through the perforated decking and creating a glistening bridge surface.

Materials:

The Pavilion is a lightweight factory made product, but in contrast to its nearby relative, the ‘temporary’ opera pavilion, the island pavilion and bridge are permanent structures, fabricated using high quality durable materials and finishes – stainless steel as opposed to galvanised steel. Matt Uginox Top stainless steel was selected for construction, with a bead-blasted effect and as a long life maintenance-free material, is in contrast to the highly polished stainless steel finish of the permanent sculpture. The use of steel also celebrates 100 years since the invention of stainless steel in Sheffield in 1913. Materials, Finishes and Fittings were considered within the pavilion interior including the illuminated acoustic ceiling system, lacquered wall panelling, terrazzo floor, Jean Prouve furniture, and cutlery and crockery by David Mellor. A further external sculpture by Mel Kendrick entitled ‘Marker 4’ has also been added to the island.

Innovation:

The project seeks to continue the experimental tradition of a relatively small project used to advance the understanding of technology and product design. Innovations include:-

> A thermally insulated stainless steel superstructure with insulation filled structural members and composite floor cassettes containing insulation, under-floor heating and floor finish.

> An integrated roof and rear wall stainless steel cladding system, developed with the contractors, incorporating a bespoke panelised stainless steel sheet rainscreen system fixed

through a continuous waterproof roofing membrane using stainless steel precision engineered watertight fixings, now patented and under development for future projects.

> An illuminated acoustically transparent ceiling, flexible enough to be used for the display of art, evening dining and musical performances 

> A completely factory prefabricated product, by necessity, due to its location and restricted site. The project took six months to complete from place order to completion. It is a lesson in teamwork, integrated design and working directly with fabricators, resulting in a crafted product utilising contemporary materials and technologies.

Technical Files

Wormsley, United Kingdom
Robin Snell and Partners
©Graham Everitt – View Pictures Ltd

Info

316L/1.4404
Uginox Top

House Extension Bogindhu

Bogindhu is a large house extension and refurbishment of Bogindhu farmhouse in Aberdeenshire. The Project required a significant amount of work to the existing farmhouse including the removal of ground floor and first floor structures.

All internal walls of the original house were removed to reorganise the spaces within. The original external walls of the house were stripped back to expose the bare stone and re-lined to include insulation in order to increase the efficiency of the house.

 The new house extension was designed as a contemporary barn structure, placed in an ‘L’ formation to complete the missing side of the farm court. The first floor was marked by a stainless steel band ( Uginox Top, type 316) which serves as a cill for the cladding and in places as a gutter. The roof is a 0.5 mm standing seam system set at 500 mm which was hand-formed on site and, at just 4kg / m², weighs considerably less than a similar system in copper, zinc or aluminium. Moreover, they prefered to replace the proposed zinc roof with a stainless steel one due to concerns that the run-off water from the larch cladding, which contains tannins, may have discoloured the zinc.  Uginox Top’s durable matt finish is designed to harmonise with a wide variety of building styles and materials, in this case vertical timber façades, full height windows and stone walls.

Internally, the house extension is deliberately different from the existing stone house, the spaces are large and open with high ceilings. The double height space overlooking the living room provides a sense of drama and contrast to the smaller, more intimate spaces of the cottage.

Technical Files

Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom
Room Architects
©N. Rigden

Info

316/1.4401
Uginox Top

International Memorial of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

Their names engraved in the Ring of Remembrance

A century has passed since thousands of men made the ultimate sacrifice in the First World War, yet the duty to honour their memory remains.  The commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the start of hostilities has given rise to an international memorial that extends beyond national commemorations and the traditional national monuments to each nation’s dead.  The monument, which was officially opened on 11 November 2014 by the French President, has an unequalled moral force behind it. Positioned on a hillside at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette it overlooks the Artois Plain, the site of France’s largest military cemetery.

Stainless steel, a material for a lasting memorial

The initiative to create an international war memorial was formalised in 2011 by way of an agreement reached between the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais and the national government, and was supported by an appeal to the militaries of the affected countries in order to create a list of the victims of the battles of Flanders and Artois.  Here, the British Empire, at the height of its powers, paid the heaviest price, suffering 241,214 killed or missing in action, followed by the Germans (173,876) and the French (106,012) not to forget the Belgians, who lost 2,326 men – and others, giving a total of 579,606 names, all of whom accurately listed during the construction of the memorial.  So many names, yet each one is faithfully reproduced on the inside surface of the Ring of Remembrance built on the devastated landscape that was so hotly disputed over in 1915. Each name appears in strict alphabetical order, with no distinction made for nationality, rank, or religion, all engraved in capital letters on coloured stainless steel in a series of 500 pleated wall panels. Each panel measuring three metres high by ninety centimetres wide form the centre of the Ring.  The total written surface area of 1350 square metres reflects the sheer numbers of men who fell here. One thousand two hundred names are inscribed into each panel, with over 10 million characters being engraved, equivalent to approximately 20 typical books.

Stainless steel was chosen for its corrosion resistance and chemical reactions and its correspondingly long service life.  In this case it was supplied by Aperam in its 4404 variant, in bright annealed sheets with a 2mm thickness. The thickness was chosen to ensure that each panel would remain flat and rigid throughout, as they are held in place at  the top and bottom with no additional stiffening thus withstanding the pressure from visitors who do not hesitate to trace the names of their ancestors on paper. Cut from 35-tonne coils produced in the Genk factory, the panels were subsequently micro-blasted and given their bronze tone at Rimex Metals in England before being sent to Alès in the south of France where Citynox invested in a laser machine and custom software in order to be able to engrave the approximately 580,000 names into the 500 panels, each a virtual page in this historic record in the form of a giant loop.

A circle of solidarity

Once prepared in this manner, the immense list of victims never ends.  The Ring of Remembrance is a litany that continually restarts for all eternity:

According to its designer, the architect Philippe Prost, the Ring provides a concrete embodiment of the fraternal spirit that today’s world demands.  Strictly speaking, the circle of deceased soldiers is actually an ellipse with a circumference of 328 metres in the form of a concrete ribbon placed on the hillside and coloured to reflect the war.  Its low height is intended as a peaceful symbol, emphasising the precariousness of peace through its position at the base of the slope. The Ring bridges the gap between the heavens and the earth, balanced on a 60-metre balcony that overlooks the plain.  As a symbol of unity and eternity, it looks down over a peaceful, natural environment.

The ellipse, which can be read from end to end, clearly stands out against the landscape which otherwise extends towards the horizon, while its visually simple form belies the challenges involved in its creation.

The Ring of Remembrance is a work of art conceived to act as a bridge between the past and present, a role which it fulfils admirably.  It is made up of 129 prefabricated ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) components, with 49 of those acting as pre-stressed segments in view of their position in the landscape, while four cables ensure that the work always remains under tension.  In total, less than 5mm of flex is allowed even though each

prefabricated component weighs between 7.5 and 10 tonnes.  This feat of engineering blends seamlessly into the ellipse described by the structure’s uniformly smooth shape, while the folds of the large pages of the book on the inside of the Ring are laid out in a similarly perfect loop.

Technical Files

Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, France
Philippe Prost Architecte / AAPP
©adagp

Info

316L/1.4404

Want advice? Have a question?
Need help choosing the right stainless steel for your project?

Please call us at +1908 988 0625

Whether you are an architect, roofer, designer, construction company, prime contractor, or distributor, our team of experts can help you with your projects.

Want advice? Have a question?
Need help choosing the right stainless steel for your project?

Please call us at +1908 988 0625

Whether you are an architect, roofer, designer, construction company, prime contractor, or distributor, our team of experts can help you with your projects.

Need
inspiration? 

Take a look at the many projects that have benefited from stainless steel.

Our portfolio includes everything from the latest trends in everyday buildings to some of the world’s most aesthetically daring designs.

Need
inspiration? 

Take a look at the many projects that have benefited from stainless steel.

Our portfolio includes everything from the latest trends in everyday buildings to some of the world’s most aesthetically daring designs.

Sign up for the Newsletter

Whether you’re an architect, an installer or a design firm, keep up to date with the latest Uginox news by subscribing to our Newsletter.
Consult our Privacy and Cookies Policy.

Scroll to top

Sign up for the Newsletter