By Farzad Esnaashari, M.Arch, Quadrant Architects
The front entrance is the only part of an industrial building most people ever see. Clients, suppliers, and job candidates all arrive at the same door, and on most industrial sites that door was never really designed. The building was planned around the production floor, the loading bays, and truck movement. The office ended up as a box at the front, and the entrance was whatever was left over.
We recently completed a project like this at 1200 Denison Street in Markham, for Shunda Polyurethane Ltd. The client asked for two things: reface the building and improve the entrance. This article walks through how we approached it, and what to consider if you are thinking about the same kind of upgrade for your building.
The new entrance is a glass-fronted pavilion. The glass wall system used on projects like this is called a curtain wall: large panels of glass held in place by a grid of aluminum frames. You have seen curtain walls on office buildings, they are what makes a building look like it is made of glass.
Behind or beside any curtain wall there has to be structure, something strong enough to hold the glass in place and carry the roof above it. On this project, that structure is a steel frame made of square hollow steel tubes, six inches by six inches, known in construction as HSS members.
The usual way to build an entrance like this is with two separate systems. The steel frame holds up the roof. The curtain wall then gets its own second layer of framing to hold up the glass. Two systems, two sets of parts, and a thicker wall to hide it all in.
We built it differently. The same steel frame that carries the roof also holds up the glass directly. The aluminum curtain wall attaches straight to the steel, with no second layer of framing in between.
In the diagram above, the steel frame is shown in red. It carries the roof and the glass wall at the same time. The diagram below shows the detail: the vertical aluminum frames that hold the glass, called mullions, line up directly with the steel members behind them.
You can see the finished assembly on the 1200 Denison Street industrial entrance project.
Fewer parts. Every piece of framing you remove is material you do not pay for, a connection nobody has to design, and an installation step nobody has to schedule.
A cleaner look. With no second layer of framing to hide, the wall is thinner and simpler, and the steel structure becomes part of what you see through the glass rather than something buried inside the wall.
There is one requirement that comes with building this way: precision. When the glass attaches directly to the steel, the steel has to be fabricated and installed exactly where the drawings say it will be. That means the architect, the structural engineer, the steel fabricator, and the glass installer all have to work from the same coordinated information before anything is built. Managing that coordination was a core part of our role on this project.
Less than most owners expect. You do not have to redo the whole building to change how it looks. The entrance at Denison Street is a small part of the property, but improving it changes the impression the entire facility makes.
That is worth remembering when setting a budget. New cladding spread across a large building rarely changes much. The same money spent on a well-built entrance changes the first impression completely, and the entrance is the part visitors actually walk through.
Start with whether they understand how your facility runs. On a working plant, the things that decide a project are practical: truck circulation, shift schedules, and how much of the budget needs to stay with the production side of the business.
Then ask whether they will coordinate the engineering, fabrication, and installation themselves, or hand you a drawing and step back. As the entrance at Denison Street shows, some of the best design decisions only work when everyone building the project is involved while it is still being designed.
Quadrant Architects works with industrial and commercial building owners across Markham, Richmond Hill, Vaughan, Scarborough, North York, and the wider GTA on facade upgrades, office entrances, additions, and change of use.
Related services: industrial architect · Markham commercial architect · tenant improvement and change of use.
Get in touch to talk through your building.
Farzad Esnaashari, M.Arch, Quadrant Architects. 416-835-0053 · farzad@quadrantarchitects.com