California State Lottery Hit the Jackpot with Cable Tension Structural Glass Wall
Trying to accent the organization’s brand theme “inspirer of dreams”, The California Lottery Association (CLA) tries to inspire those who enter its headquarters from the very beginning. Located north of downtown Sacramento and adjacent to the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, the glass tower serves more than 400 employees. The six-story building contains 157,000 square feet of office space and features street level retail spaces, public plazas, water features, and a 400-seat pavilion that can be used by the public for community events. The open public lobby is designed as a gallery to display diverse student art, reaffirming the lottery’s primary mission of supporting public schools.
Budgeted at $63 million, the project’s IPD delivery reduced the final building cost to $58 million and obtained LEED Gold Certification. The building was designed to capture and mirror the energy and excitement of the California Lottery and echoes its inspiring theme.
The Association worked with Otto Construction Company as the general contractor to implement the LPAS Architecture + Design. The team wanted to take advantage of the bright California sunshine but still be efficient. The building displays a dynamic, curvilinear vocabulary that evokes the kinetic motion of the spinning “Big Wheel” and the draw machine that dispenses the numbered balls for “Super Lotto”. The primary public façade is composed of curtain wall panels that loosely overlap each other as they swirl around the south and east exposures.
The owner and architects relied upon nationally-acclaimed structural glazing supplier W&W Glass to design and supervise the installation of the Pilkington Planar™ system glass lobby feature wall. Working with installer Architectural Glass and Aluminum, the professionals at W&W Glass used clear SentryGlas® interlayer laminated glass panels for the vertical walls. The walls were secured by countersunk Pilkington Planar™ 905 fittings, but to ensure the utmost visibility both inside and out, a stainless steel vertical tension cable back-up structure engineered by W&W Glass was utilized. Tension facades are another sharp looking solution to make the transparency of glass the stand-out feature, thereby further minimizing the visible structure over that of a glass fin or mullion. Tension facades use high tensile cables or machined stainless steel rods to impose the loads of the facade on the main structure. This decreases the amount of solid structural elements visible on the project, therefore increasing the transparency of the facade with vertical elements hidden behind sealant joints.
The building features many progressive sustainable strategies which includes a daylight harvesting system controlled by light sensors and a computerized, sun-tracking program to monitor window shades. Because of the efficiency of the building’s design and inclusion of numerous sustainable strategies, the owners realize a reduction in operation and maintenance cost of over 32% as compared to their existing facility and demonstrates responsible development from an economic, environmental and cultural standpoint.
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.
