118 Fulton Street – A Sleek and Textured Tower
Even though completion of the 118 Fulton Street luxury high rise isn’t expected before this time next year, the towering structure has been making swift progress over the past few months, and now, the 752-foot-tall tower has officially topped-out. Developed by Carmel Partners, the foundation work was still ongoing just over a year ago, with the 66-story building’s rise since then speeding along at an impressive pace. The project was slowed up a bit when Carmel Partners acquired the site from The Lightstone Group back in September of 2014 for $171 million.
Gilbane Building Company has been retained as the construction manager by Carmel Partners to build this sleek residential tower in Manhattan’s Financial District. The new development consists of 483 mixed-income luxury apartment rentals, including 97 affordable units and 12 penthouse units. The project also boasts two floors of retail space and three amenity levels, including a health club, terrace, 64th floor lounge, and a rooftop terrace.
Given the corridor’s heavy pedestrian traffic, a strong retail presence is appropriate. Current plans for 118 Fulton meet the street in an attractive format, engaging with the built fabric to enhance the block’s street wall with a relatively hefty base, before massing shrinks and the tower continues its ascent. Adding to the iconic structures in the Financial District, this tall, slender skyscraper is completely enveloped in curtain wall with clear vision and patterned glass, creating a striking glass facade to add to lower Manhattan’s skyline.
Even though the overall exterior design is a more traditional box shape, the building’s shear height should help it to hold it’s own with so many new towers going up in the vicinity. Gerner Kronick + Valcarcel Architects is the design architect, and SLCE Architects is the architect of record. The design team knew the heavily glass-clad facade required a firm with a high-degree of capability in design and execution on projects like this so they selected the nationally-acclaimed, New York-based glazing contractor W&W Glass, LLC based on experience and competitive pricing to handle the exterior curtain wall work.
According to W&W project manager Ana Barrueto-Daley, the project is massive. The plan called for a HYBRID-WALL® 2 by SOTAWALL® covering 214,000 sqft of structurally-glazed exterior facade using 4,846 full size unitized panels (with over 900 operable windows), plus 100 parapet panels. The panels are all large and in varied sizes from 4′-4″ wide x 9′-10″ tall from 5th to 41st floor and then 4′-4″ wide x 10′-4″ tall from the 42nd floor up. The glazing utilized three types of glass: vision, standard full surface spandrel, and custom spandrel with digitally-printed ceramic frit patterns. All three were fabricated by Viracon. The spandrel glass with digital frit gives the building its “white stripes” that will reflect the sunlight or blend into the facade, depending on the light orientation during the day.
While being called “apartments”, the rental units will average a spacious 1,124 square feet each and feel more like condominiums. 118 Fulton’s recent topping-out is only the latest milestone in Fulton Street’s rapid evolution, and several smaller projects have recently sprouted in surrounding blocks. While the impact of the glassy box on the skyline may be subtle, its effects on the streetscape down below will be both beneficial and significant, injecting another component that will help complete Fulton Street’s transition into a mixed-use corridor. Leasing is scheduled to begin this spring.
For more information on all the projects completed and underway by the W&W Glass professionals, visit our portfolio section.
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.
