Melopee Winner of the Global Galvanizing Awards

Yesterday, the winners of the Global Galvanizing Awards were announced at Intergalva, the International Galvanizing Conference, in Rome. These awards recognize the innovative use of hot-dip galvanized steel by architects, engineers and steel fabricators and are presented in conjunction with the galvanizing industry's global forum - Intergalva.

Independent jury

Zinkinfo is enormously proud to announce to you that the jury, chaired by Prof. Raffaele Landolfo (Department of Structures for Engineering and Architecture University of Naples), has awarded the Architectural Award to a project from the Benelux, submitted by Zinkinfo and thus galvanized by one of its members, namely Melopee in Ghent.

The city building Melopee, on the Oude Dokken in Ghent, refers to the Antwerp poet Paul van Ostaijen's poem of the same name. A striking feature of Melopee is its green outdoor room: a grid of galvanized steel where lush greenery will soon find its way. The word itself also means "sound poem" and is in keeping with elementary school musical pedagogy.

Willem Van Besien - XDGA: "The concept of the open outdoor room with the playgrounds came about because the site was too small for the program the builder wanted to realize. In the end, we opted for a compact school building situated as a rational rectangular box of 40m x 30m on the east side of the site. This freed up space on the waterfront where we used the maximum free building height of 20m. It was clear from the beginning that we would not have enough space on the ground floor for the playground. The solution was to stack the different playgrounds, which naturally led to the choice of an open support structure. The compactness of the school building means that the classrooms and the sports hall are on different levels. We wanted to avoid the pupils and users of the sports hall constantly moving from one level to another via the internal staircase. The stacking ensures that the playgrounds are on the same level as the classrooms."

Choice of steel

Willem Van Besien - XDGA: "In addition to the obvious economic reason of building quickly and lightly; there is also the openness of the whole structure, so the building merges, as it were, with the beauty of the waterfront. We wanted to create a large degree of slenderness for the outdoor room to preserve the openness and enhance the visual contact with the water."

Choice of hot-dip galvanized steel

Willem Van Besien - XDGA:  "XDGA prefers to choose "real" materials for both structures and finishes where we hide as little as possible. We avoid -if possible- 'artificial' interventions that hide the uniqueness of materials."

"Galvanized steel is a type of structural material that produces unique and interesting results provided proper attention is paid to its execution and detailing."

Want to know more about hot-dip galvanizing? Check our website www.zinkinfobenelux.com