Design flexibility and an attractive aesthetic led to the choice of metal composite material (MCM) from Citadel Architectural Products for a highly visible hotel project at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Envelope 2000, installed using the RainScreen (RS) attachment system, offered a durable façade for the Courtyard by Marriott, a five-story LEED certified hotel. Citadel Architectural Products manufactures panels and systems that are on a list of approved products by Marriott.

“We started with a complete palette of materials,” says Mark Miller, RA, associate at Erdy McHenry Architecture in Philadelphia. “We tend to lean toward metal because it provides more flexibility than bricks or other materials. We can design façades with undulation, panel depth. Other materials tend to leave you with a flat façade.”

The ground floor of the facility features a dining and bar/lounge facility, a fitness room and more than 2,000 square feet of meeting space for hotel guests and corporations within the Navy Yard. Miller says the design goal was to maintain the established façade curvature that faces the on-site park, while ensuring daylighting and views for all guestrooms.

The colors specified were Silver Metallic and two custom Silver shades, approximately 30,000 square feet in all.

“The exterior of the building at the guestrooms are clad in a metal composite material RainScreen system, giving the building an ever-changing skin that depends upon the time of day and amount of sunlight,” Miller says. “The RainScreen creates a system to reduce the building’s overall heat gain by using a series of sub-girts and custom aluminum clips to prevent transfer of heat to the building sub-framing.

The Envelope 2000 RainScreen system was installed by Towne and Country Roofing of Bensalem, Pa. Todd Mentasti, estimator for Towne and Country, says the panels were three different colors and laid out in specific order by the architect. Different color panels were also installed at different depths, providing some real definition to the walls.

“To be honest, when we saw the drawings we weren’t sure how it was going to look,” Mentasti says. “Once we had a section done we realized it was going to look great. When it was completed, it looked fantastic.”

The Towne and Country crew “had to pay extra close attention” to the drawings while installing the fabricated panels of different colors and depths, Mentasti says. “Some were installed two inches out from the deck, some five inches out and some at seven inches,” he says.

Another installation challenge was the curved portion of the building at the main entrance. No panels or windows were curved, but installed in smaller segments to create the curved look. “Some of the panels were four feet wide, but most were smaller,” Mentasti says. “It takes more time to install more panels, but it was worth it to achieve the curved appearance. Curving longer panels would have required more time and they wouldn’t have looked the same as these segmented panels.”

Mentasti says Towne and Country routinely installs composite panels from Citadel Architectural Products and has more projects calling for them in 2016.

For more information, visit www.citadelap.com.