September 26, 2008

The Hilton Garden Inn used concrete panels sprayed with urethane insulation for one of its

Design

Silence through concrete achieved with design

Montreal hotel replaces typical metal frame

PETER KENTER

correspondent

MONTREAL, QC

Montreal’s Hilton Garden Inn is a $65-million, 221-room hotel that’s designed for the comfort of guests. And it’s made primarily of concrete.

“Most of the hotel buildings built in the 1970s were far from efficient,” says Louis Secondo, General Manager of the hotel.

“They’re Gyproc on Gyproc and gift-wrapped in styrofoam insulation. When it gets to minus 30 you always get that chilly feeling. Our new building has no metal frame. It’s all concrete, which insulates it for sound and against the weather.”

The hotel was designed by Éric Huot of Geiger et Huot Architectes of Montreal for Canvar Group. The design also features granite floors, a restaurant, gymnasium, swimming pool, private movie theatre, and a 25-storey tower of rental units above the hotel, which will open next summer.

“The building is constructed on concrete frames and on that frame we’ve hung pre-cast concrete panels,” says Huot.

“That’s an advantage for us in several ways. It’s a speedy type of construction so that after the frame is erected, you can hang about one floor per day until the entire system is in place. The panels are erected using a tower crane. If we chose brick or masonry, we’d have to erect scaffolding and the job would have taken years.”

The concrete panels are sprayed from the inside with a continuous film of urethane insulation.

“That whole urethane film runs from the top of the building to the bottom,” says Huot. “Once that barrier is in place, everything is sealed to the outside elements. You don’t worry about air infiltration and drafts.”

The inside walls are lined with a very narrow non-structural stud wall, designed to provide a space for additional insulation before installing the wall surface.

“Because the building is air tight, and made of solid concrete it already has a high R value,” says Huot. “But stuffing a little more insulation into the outer walls gives it just a little more R value to reduce operating costs and to insulate the building further from outside noise.”

While some hotels use poured concrete for interior walls between rooms, Huot says that column and slab construction better suited the design, with extra acoustic insulation providing noise reduction between hotel rooms. “We’ve insulated the partitions, the door frames and anywhere you might normally expect sound to carry through,” adds Secondo. “Today, everybody talks about green buildings, but what exactly does that mean? In the hotel industry, there’s often a difference between what’s considered green and what’s functional and comfortable, and I think we’ve achieved all of those goals with this concrete design.”

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