Award Winning Work Illustrates Breadth of Talent and Consistency of W&W Glass
Firms must be truly talented and pay careful attention to detail to help create a project that wins a prestigious design and architecture award. To help more than one project win the same award in separate categories proves a company is elite. This was clearly illustrated when the NYCxDESIGN Awards were announced recently and world-renowned glass design and installation firm W&W Glass based in New York was involved in three projects that took home honors.
NYCxDESIGN brings together all the disciplines of design, commerce, culture, education, and entertainment with a full, varied program, including exhibitions, installations, trade shows, talks, launches and open studios. Interior Design and ICFF created The NYCxDESIGN Awards to honor the outstanding designs exhibited throughout the New York city surrounding area. The annual event celebrates outstanding talent across major areas of design such as architecture, interiors, furnishings, lighting, and technology, and unifies the more than 500 events taking place during New York City’s showcase of global design. Honorees for both products and projects were named in over 30 categories.
W&W Glass teams collaborated with several firms to produce amazing new buildings, renovations, and stunning entrances. One winning project was a commercial interior lobby renovation located at 195 Broadway for which Gabellini Sheppard Associates’ design won in the Commercial Lobby category.
After five years in the planning L&L Holding Company wanted to make a large statement so they selected GSA to complete renovation of the lobby and concourse-level installation of 35,000 square feet of new retail space. W&W Glass partnered with McLaren Engineering to come up with a custom system on the project. TriPyramid Structures, Inc. was commissioned to design and fabricate each of the custom bronze patch fittings, keeping them as minimal as possible, to sustain the massive load that the over sized low-iron laminated glass would impose.
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The design separated the area into a leasable retail space from the main lobby entrance with a structural glass wall to be as unobtrusive and transparent as possible. The architect’s plan was to have single span glass in height with only three lites in each of the bays that varied from 17′-0″ to 17′-8″ wide directly behind the columns creating a “Galleria” from the North to the South end to divide the building. In the center of each bay would be a 9-foot wide by 10-foot tall vitrine to act as display windows and some as entrances to the spaces.
These windows also included glass roofed vitrines. There was a much smaller bay at the North End and a larger bay at the South End. The 10-foot high side walls of these vitrines act as fins that support the lateral load for the whole 30-foot tall glass wall. After concluding that it would be impossible to maneuver a single lite glass almost 30-feet high in this space, the plan changed to use 10-foot tall bottom lites as the vitrines and fins and upper lites as large as 19-feet tall in some instances.
In the Government/Institutional category, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) was the architect of record for the new Public Safety Answering Center II (PSACII). The center is designed to operate continually under adverse conditions and provide redundancy to the city’s primary call center. After the 911 attacks on New York, besides rebuilding, the second thing city officials concentrated on was security, a crucial requirement for this project. It required a highly-skilled glass design and metal panel enclosure installation team to make the owner’s vision a reality. W&W Glass was selected to engineer and install the main building façade, in addition to the glass lobby entrance and interior blast and fire-rated curtain wall.
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Due to its versatility and reliability, the company also installed a Pilkington Planar™ vertical entrance wall system. The components selected for the exterior face glass were Pilkington Planar™ Intrafix (concealed fittings inside the units) and standard Pilkington Optiwhite™ low-iron insulating PVB laminated glass units. Pilkington Intrafix 902 fittings along with Hatfield stainless steel spider castings were used to secure the units. The interior glazing assemblies were made of SaftiFirst Fire and Blast resistant curtain wall.
Finally, in the NYCXDesign X-Factor category, the New York City Library was the hands down winner! Designed by principal architect Enrique Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos, the library is a subterranean mix of old and new, combining printed literature and technology, and the solitude of being social. The new space features an amphitheater and an auditorium with TV screens for programs and events, high ceilings, and modern décor. Though two of its three floors are below street level, the library feels bright and spacious, thanks in part to its glassy façade.
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W&W Glass worked hand in hand with the architects and engineers, to construct a transparent jewel box allowing lots of light to stream into the library. The designers selected Pilkington Planar™ structural glass systems with a mix of support structures. Cantilevered laminated glass fins highlight the main front wall and steel substructure backs the interior structural glass walls. The face glass is made of Pilkington Planar™ Optiwhite low-iron SentryGlas® laminated glass. To anchor the glass back to the structure, glaziers used Pilkington 905 series countersunk bolt fittings. The glass wall face glass extends up in front of an upturned concrete slab at the top and employs an insulating laminated glass return at the head of the wall thus providing a transparent closure. It allows the visitor to look right down through the top of the monolithic wall.
Submissions began filtering in beginning in February and the entry deadline closed in mid-April. After several weeks of careful scrutiny, the winners were announced at a gala in New York on May 20th. Click here to see the entire list of winners. For more information on all the projects completed and underway by the W&W Glass professionals, visit our project portfolio.
W&W Glass LLC is a family owned business with a 70-year history in the metal and glass industry, one of the largest metal and glass companies in the New York metropolitan area and the largest supplier of structural glass systems in the country. We have over two decades of experience in the design and installation of various building enclosure systems, including stick-built curtain walls, pre-glazed unitized curtain walls, Pilkington Planar™ structural glass facades, and custom metal and glass enclosure systems. We install all of our work with our own dedicated union labor force. W&W is consistently the largest employer of glaziers in the NY metropolitan area.
