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Glass Adds Class To Hill House
The City of London Corporation has approved plans from Landsec to transform Hill House, EC4 into a sustainable workspace and new rooftop restaurant. The...
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Harmony In Geneva
The Geneva Marriott Hotel is one of a new generation of Marriott Hotels placing a specific focus on sustainability. Harmony Smart Windows from SageGlass make a valuable contribution to the hotel’s energy efficiency.
The building shell is High Performance Energy (HPE) certified.
After four years of construction, the hotel opened with its four-star-plus business class standard and proximity to Geneva airport and the Palexpo International Exhibition and Convention Centre.
Over a total of 11 levels, the hotel boasts 263 guest rooms, including 23 suites, with views of the nearby Alps all the way to Mont Blanc.
Architectural features
Geneva based MaS architects Jean Serrano and Christophe Marti took advantage of the site’s gradient and placed a large two-story entrance area beneath an L-shaped building that is the location of the guest bedrooms.
On the ground floor of the central entrance hall is the Great Room with the reception and lounge, plus other facilities, an area spanning around 1,800 square meters. Above this lies the conference floor with six different sized spaces for conferences and seminars and an events ballroom with capacity for 350 people. Four other levels in the basement section serve as an underground car park and a technical unit. The upper stories are home to the hotel rooms and suites and a large 24-hour gym.
Daylight for full views of the Alps
The sleek facade highlights the use of the building, visible for miles around, as a hotel. This is particularly true of the L-shaped tower with its window ribbons featuring alternating windows and dark glass panelling. In the entrance hall, the architects opted for glazing on two stories with floor-to-ceiling windows. Maximum incident daylight and energy-efficient sunlight management were therefore a declared objective when selecting the glazing.
Harmony
Harmony, an electrochromic glass from SageGlass, was selected based on comfort. The smart window tints automatically as needed to avoid heat and glare. With its gradual tinting, however, SageGlass Harmony offers more than just excellent solar shading, it also guarantees a constantly unimpeded view of the outdoors – which is a big plus for the south-facing hotel rooms with views of the Alps.
The hotel was also able to dispense with maintenance-intensive shading systems. Indeed, on the upper stories of the building, using external roller shutters as solar shading would have been out of the question due to the wind conditions.
In the public areas of the entrance hall and conference floor, SageGlass Harmony stood out in particular thanks to its excellent colour rendering. Last but not least, the smart window makes a major contribution to the building’s good energy performance with average energy savings of 10 to 20% when compared to standard glass.
Sustainability and energy efficiency
The sustainability concept of the Geneva Marriott Hotel is based on Marriott International’s objectives for a more ethical form of production and consumption. This states that, by 2025, water use, carbon footprints and raw material and food waste should be drastically reduced in hotels.
Picture: SageGlass in use at the Geneva Marriott Hotel.
Article written by John Roper
01st June 2023