RMIG - Perforation in Architecture

Perforated Metal Cladding - Metal Facades - Perforated Aluminium Cladding - Perforation Patterns

RMIG is the world’s largest perforation company and offers a wide range of standard and custom perforation patterns to meet a diversity of functional and decorative applications in architectural cladding, facades, balustrading and interiors, to name but a few.

Creative Perforation

One of the first advantages of perforated metal cladding to be recognised and exploited by architects was its ability to interact with natural and artificial light, both as a tool for night-time creative lighting effects and a method of providing versatile solar shading during the day.

By using perforation patterns to create geometric shapes, logos and even two-dimensional renderings of complex images, the use of creative exterior and interior lighting has been used in a number of projects to give added appeal to a building and reinforce its position or role within the built environment.

A particularly striking example of how perforated metal façades from RMIG helped give a new lease of life to an existing building is the Maison du Portugal building in Paris, which was refurbished using more than 4500m² of perforated aluminium cladding.

Night time lighting and illumination was also a key architectural consideration when designing the four-storey White Star House building in Belfast, which was clad with 1.3km² of decorative aluminium incorporating hundreds of 10mm square perforations to act as diffusers for low level interior lighting.

In addition, reflective metallic surfaces have also been considered by some architects as part of their designs to allow ambient light from street lamps and passing cars to create their own constantly changing ‘lightshow’.

Innovative Solutions

While RMIG has a diversity of standard perforation patterns and sizes that can be produced in a range of different materials, RMIG is regularly called upon to produce ‘custom’ or bespoke designs to meet the specifications demanded by innovative architectural designs. In these situations, the material selection can be influenced by both practical and aesthetic considerations, while the inspiration for the perforation patterns can come from some unusual sources.

Architects for the Ruban Bleu retail and commercial centre in St Nazaire, took their inspiration for the pattern in the structure’s 1,300 m² of cladding from the town’s nautical heritage in ship-building and port operations. The centre’s ceiling panels, include a marine map produced from thousands of small perforations in the 1.5mm thick aluminium panels, which were produced using tooling specially developed for the project by RMIG.

A series of technical challenges were overcome by RMIG in developing the unique aluminium cladding for The Oslo Opera House in Norway, which not only won the culture category of the 2008 World Architecture Festival, but also scooped the prestigious Mies van der Rohe award for contemporary European architecture in May 2009.

Architectural Design Freedom

As part of the architect’s vision, input from Scandinavian artists and sculptors was used to reflect Norway’s culture and heritage within the fabric of the building and the cladding uses a unique design involving a complex array of convex domes and conical indentations to represent a particular pattern used in traditional Norwegian weaving techniques.

Audi’s innovative ‘terminal’ corporate architecture developed for its worldwide dealer network, also uses precision perforated, formed and anodised aluminium from RMIG, used to great effect on the striking ‘engineered’ exterior on the Otto Grimm Audi dealership at Bitterfeld-Wolfen near Leipzig, Germany.