Fluidity, Façades and Finishes

by Mark Robins | 1 December 2021 12:00 am

The campus is lined with pedestrian paths and outdoor spaces, blending workspaces with the natural world. It also promotes energy efficiency and employee health by maximizing daylight, and incorporates an abundance of native plants.

The building’s unique massing uses mechanical doors to integrate the interior and exterior spaces, as well as exterior staircases and walkways to travel between floors and parts of the building. This fluidity between spaces and large windows maximizes natural light and access to the outdoors for employees. The project is built horizontally, instead of a typical vertical office tower, allowing people to have different indoor/outdoor experiences with space.

The 2021 Metal Construction News Project Excellence Awards judges were so impressed by it they awarded it a Judges Award. William S. Duff Jr., AIA, LEED AP, believes the Facebook project is a really successful use of metal in architecture and is integral to its solution. Steve Dumez, FAIA, says the metal applications add great richness.

Matthew S. Kruntorád, AIA, LEED AP, calls it a spectacular project. “The façade—which is really well-detailed, proportioned and developed—is a backdrop in a really beautiful way. It gives justice to the outdoor spaces. It’s a nice balance and sensibility. There are tall spaces. It could be an imposing building, especially in metal, but it’s not. It has really very delightful spaces to be in and is supported in the ways the materials are used.”

Aluminum Cladding, Custom Finishes

The project’s architect NBBJ, Seattle, and the project team wanted something unique for the façade design that would be visually stunning while meeting their sustainability goals. To contextualize the façade, aluminum cladding was fabricated in a super-tight shark fin corrugation. The general contractor was Turner Construction Co., New York City, and the installer was Northshore Exteriors Inc., Everett, Wash.

“Corrugated and bent metal, especially when paired with a luminescent clear coat, offers the ability to create façade texture and visual diversity,” says Geoff Hahn, creative director at Pure + FreeForm, St. Paul, Minn. “For this project, we created two custom micro-corrugated profiles to pair with two different custom finishes: Washington Steel and Twilight Bronze. Light hits these panels at various angles due to the differences in the corrugations, offering varied tones, textures and shadow lines. The finishes used on these panels were totally custom to the site, making it more locally relevant than a predesigned material.”

The history of Bellevue’s Spring District inspired the different custom finishes that call upon the former industrial nature of the community. “Using locally significant blackened steel and rust as bases, we created contemporized versions in the right tones,” says Will Pilkington, operations manager at Pure + FreeForm. “But to modernize the topcoat and offer more luminosity and glint than the archetype, we added a clear coat (Crystal Basecoat) to the surface which brings out the natural variation in the metal substrate. When light hits the surface at different angles, the onlooker may experience a major shift in color and texture on the same plane, achieved by the luminosity of the metal itself and not the depth of the coating.”

Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/fluidity-facades-and-finishes-earn-facebook-building-a-2021-mcn-judges-award-3/

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