End of ‘The Brown Building’
February 2017

Architectural aluminium systems from TECHNAL have been installed at Nine Bond Court in Leeds.

Located in Leeds’ Commercial Quarter, the 12-storey 60,000sq ft office accommodation, was built in 1976, originally housing insurance company Royal Sun Alliance.

The Tudor brick and Baltic Brown granite envelope, with original bronze-coloured glazing and brown back painted spandrel panels led people to refer to it as ‘the brown building’.

In 2005, the building underwent extensive refurbishment to upgrade the building’s M&E systems and internal works, but the external envelope was left untouched at this point.

The property was purchased in 2013 by its current owner. The latest phase of improvement to the building has been designed by Leeds-based Think Architecture + Design, and involved the refurbishment of the external envelope.

The new façade features Technal’s MX Visible Grid curtain wall system to create floor to ceiling glazing, maximising natural daylight. Project architect and director of Think Architecture + Design Jonathan Wilson explained how the glazed elements were created: “The original single glazed aluminium windows featured small panes of bronze tinted glass, which not only cut out daylight but absorbed the sun and radiated back into the building making the building a challenge from a heating and ventilation perspective. The old windows had deteriorated and leaked air too, so were draughty.

“Technal offers a good range of systems and it was its MX system that was selected to house the floor to ceiling height, clear solar control glazing. Typically, the vision unit sizes were 2.7m high x 1.2m wide with the corner units 2.7m high x 2.3m wide.”

Technal’s MX curtain walling and automated double CD commercial doors with an additional single exit door were installed to ground and first floor level adjacent to the building's reception area, creating a double height entrance with mullions spanning 7m in height.

Also featured on the project are Technal’s FXi65 top hung windows, which replaced existing windows like for like.

James Sutherland of fabricator Dortech said: “Technal offers a good level of service, which is great on a project like this. Its systems are reliable and work well both from a performance and architectural perspective. As this building was 80% occupied during the refurbishment, work had to be undertaken to fit around the building’s users, which meant careful planning, with much of the work completed out of office hours. The results are impressive though.”