From today's NY Times. John Kraljic February 6, 2002 COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE Designed to Stand Out in a Crowd By JOHN HOLUSHA The builders and operators of the new Westin Hotel, which is scheduled to open this November at Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan, wanted to draw attention to the building. So they commissioned the Miami firm of Arquitectonica to design a building that would cry look at me even over the profusion of brightly lighted signs in Times Square. The firm responded with a design for a 45-story tower enclosed in multicolored glass and split top to bottom by a curving beam of light that appears to burst into the sky. The eye catching facade design presented difficult engineering problems for Tishman Realty and Construction, the developer and owner of the $300 million 860-room hotel. It will be operated by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the real estate investment trust that owns the Westin, W and Sheraton brands. In most modern construction, the outer walls bear no weight and are simply attached to the steel or reinforced concrete structure of the building. These curtain walls are there to keep the heat and air-conditioning in and the weather out. They also establish the look of the building. Because of the curves on the north and south facades and the selection of multiple colors of glass, very few of the aluminum-encased glass panels are alike, complicating both the manufacture of the facade and its installation. "In a typical building you will have about 50 different types of panels," said David Horowitz, a Tishman vice president who is overseeing construction of the hotel. "Here we had 1,200 to 1,300 unique panel types." The facade of the Westin hotel being built at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue poses special engineering problems. To handle the project, which is now nearing completion, Tishman assembled a multinational group of designers and fabricators to come up with a skin for the building that met the architect's design requirements and could still keep out the wind and the rain of the worst storm that would be likely in a century. Beginning in early 1998, Viracon, a glass manufacturer based in Owatonna, Minn., sent dozens of samples of glass to Arquitectonica, which selected 10 base colors: copper, gold, bronze, orange, white, silver, violet, green, blue and aqua. Viracon would ultimately produce 8,000 glass sheets in those colors, and in clear glass panels, for the 184,000-square-foot outer wall of the hotel. Then, as usual, the architects turned their conceptual designs over to an engineering company to figure out how to build the panels. The company selected was Permasteelisa Cladding Technologies, a company in Northern Italy with an assembly plant in Windsor, Conn. The outer frames of the panels were designed to hold a clear inner pane of glass and a colored outer one separated by five-eighths of an inch of air space for insulation.Once the design was completed and approved, the frames were formed by extrusion, in which aluminum alloy is driven through a die with great force to form the desired shape. Because of the complexity of the project, each piece of the facade, including the glass, was marked with a bar code to help workers with the assembly. Once formed, the frame pieces were sent to a painting specialist in the Netherlands to receive a highly durable coating of sliver or copper color, depending on its position in the facade. (The project was actually even more international than it appears, Mr. Horowitz said - the engineering team was mostly Croatian.) Once formed, painted and cut to length and machined, the parts were crated and shipped to the plant in Windsor where they were assembled into panels and the glass installed. Most of the panels are about 5 feet wide but the height ranges from 9 to 18 feet, depending on the floor where they are to be installed. Attaching the panels to the concrete structure of the building involved advanced planning. Before pouring each floor, crews embedded U-shaped metal channels that will be held in place by the hardened concrete. Metal anchor plates are bolted to the channels and then the panels are set onto clips attached to the anchor plates. Permasteelisa's crews began installing the facade in mid-May last year and reached the 45th floor by December. Installation of levels above the 45th floor is expected to take several months longer because of the difficult logistics of lifting the panels from the 45th floor to higher levels of the building. The elaborate facade is limited to the tower part of the project. The low-rise part of the hotel, which is above Tishman's existing E Walk entertainment, retail and restaurant complex on 42nd Street, will have metal facade panels that will present a smooth aluminum face to the exterior, interrupted by square windows. This lower part of the building runs from the 5th floor to the 17th floor of the main building along Eighth Avenue. It was originally designed to be operated by a separate company and to be aimed at leisure travelers and families, as distinct from the business travelers more typical of Westin's guests, but it is now fully integrated with the hotel. There will be internal access from the 200,000-square-foot E Walk complex to the hotel - officially the Westin New York at Times Square. distributed by CROWN - www.croatianworld.net - CroWorldNet@aol.com Notice: This e-mail and the attachments are confidential information.If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail and the attachments is strictly prohibited and violators will be held to the fullest possible extent of any applicable laws governing electronic Privacy. If you have received this e-mail in error please immediately notify the sender by telephone or e-mail, and permanently delete this e-mail and any attachments.
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