Protruding Pattern

by Christopher Brinckerhoff | 2 December 2019 12:00 am

Keith Sagliocca, associate at Woods Bagot in New York City, which designed the project, says, “The flatter portions of the panels face southeast. That’s where we introduce a fold and change the angle of the secondary panel, which creates movement across the façade in different lighting conditions.”

The horizontal arms of the no. 7s shade the window bays below them, while the vertical parts shade window bays to the right of them. “Because it’s this shingled pattern, the verticals cast a shadow into the adjacent window bay,” Sagliocca says.

Contemporary Interpretation

Relative to design development, the deep facades were inspired, in part, by the Cary Building. The Cary Building is a historical landmark building across the street from 108 Chambers, which is named for its address on Chambers Street. The Cary Building, circa 1857, has an Italian-style deep façade with repetitive, arched windows. It also features Corinthian columns, bracketed cornices and faux rustication. It was constructed with a cast iron façade and painted white.

Conversely, the 108 Chambers building has a contemporary design and construction method that utilized aluminum panels and a special finish that reacts to sunlight and appears to change colors throughout the day.

“[The Cary Building has a] cast iron façade that features an abundance of ornamentation, and we wanted to interpret that in a contemporary way,” Sagliocca says. “Instead of doing similar types of ornamentation, we emphasize the highlights and shadows within the panel to get a finer articulation, but not necessarily in the same manner of the Cary Building. It’s a faceted panel, and it has a series of folds and creases within it. As the sun moves across the sky, different panels become highlighted or are cast in shadow. The varying angles of the sun throughout the day create different readings of the building. Certain panels are highlighted, so it really breaks down the faces of the panels in different ways throughout the day.”

Color Changes

The metal panels have a warm glow in the morning, are highlighted on different facets during the day, and then become darker and make the facades appear deeper during the evening, Sagliocca says. “The majority of the building is facing east, so a lot of the activity happens earlier in the day, but it definitely goes from a warmer glow in the morning, a more dynamic movement throughout the day, and then at night it becomes a more subtle, deeper bronze tone.”

To build the facades on the 10-story building, BAMCO Inc. fabricated 10,000 square feet of Pure + FreeForm’s 3-mm-thick aluminum wall panels with a Deco Bronze finish. The panels cover the edges of the floor slabs and spandrels where there is solid material behind them including at columns and interior walls.

The finish on the panels helps produce the facades’ range of colors and appearances. Deco Bronze finish is comprised of a clear base coat on aluminum, followed by four colors of bronze and brass pearlescent inks. The inks are applied in various methods, which gives the finish randomization, says Geoffrey Hahn, creative director at Pure + FreeForm. “That’s why you get so much depth in it, because it has subtle variation,” he says.

The aluminum is visible through the pearlescent inks, but the inks make the tone warmer than bare aluminum, Hahn says. “It gets a glint of aluminum, because that’s what you’re seeing, but warmth comes from the bronze and brass inks.”

Human Scale

The 108 Chambers building is designed to coordinate with other architecture in its vicinity, which is the Tribeca neighborhood. Its bronze-colored finish coordinates with neutral tones of white, tan, brown and gray on other nearby buildings. Also, in addition to the Cary Building, other nearby buildings have deep, repetitious facades.

“This whole area of Tribeca is really rich with these cast iron facades,” Sagliocca says. “That’s just not a construction method that’s really used anymore, so we were trying to replicate that depth and that quality with contemporary materials. So that’s where we got the depth and the shingling, or the angling of the panels, that helps break down the façade into a rhythm that’s more relatable to the human scale. Rather than having a façade where everything is at the same depth across, breaking down of the façade into these angled modules helps make it a more relatable scale.”

Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/protruding-pattern/

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