GMS was thrilled to participate in the Facades+ Conference, held in New York City on April 13-14, where Senior Building Envelope Consultant Sara Gonzalez gave a presentation on 130 William Street. The façade of this unique 66-story building in Lower Manhattan is made of pre-cast panels with arched windows and loggias on the top floors. GMS was the façade consultant on the project, working with developer Lightstone Group, Adjaye Associates, and Hill West Architects.

GMS is excited to be working with Tishman Speyer, providing Building Envelope Consulting Services for the development of a new condominium residential development at 11 Hoyt Street in Brooklyn.  The building consists of a 57 story tower, approximately 770,000 sf, which rises to a height of over 600 feet with one cellar level below grade, and a green roof above a two–story podium. The tower houses 481 apartments with over 55,000 sf of amenity spaces.

The IASS 60th Anniversary Symposium (IASS SYMPOSIUM 2019) and 9th International Conference on Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures (STRUCTURAL MEMBRANES 2019) have merged into a joint international conference, FORM and FORCE 2019, aiming to provide a forum for state-of-the-art contributions and fruitful discussion in the broad fields of shell, spatial, tension and inflatable structures. The 2019 conference was held in October in Barcelona, Spain and it covered concepts related to material, design, computation, construction, maintenance, history, environmental impact and sustainability of shell, spatial, tension and inflatable structures in all fields of application.

Miguel Lopez of GMS presented a paper, Lateral Load Resisting Facades, co-authored jointly by the GMS Structural Engineers and Building Envelope consultants Miguel Lopez, Joseph Blanchfield, Philip Murray, David Kazibwe, Carolyn Bai, Ramon Gilsanz. The paper’s abstract follows:

Simple modifications to traditional curtain wall slab anchors allow designers to incorporate a structure’s building envelope system into its lateral system, leading not only to improved structural performance, but a reduction in the building construction’s carbon footprint. This approach of integrating architecture with structural design to optimize building performance and construction embodies the principles of efficiency, economy, and elegance championed by the late Princeton Professor David Billington. In this paper, the potential benefits of utilizing façade members to contribute to the building stiffness is studied by reanalyzing 510 Madison Avenue, a 2012 Class-A steel high-rise office building in Manhattan. The building’s lateral system is comprised of moment and braced frames. The building’s façade is a unitized aluminum curtain wall system that utilizes traditional curtain wall anchors designed to prevent the transfer of loads between the façade and the structure.

GMS Partners Philip Murray,  Ramon Gilsanz and colleagues Zoe Champion and Helena Ariza also attended the conference, noting the networking opportunities and planned workshops to learn about new software applications, among other things. For more information, click here.

GMS Partners Joseph Basel, PE and Gary Steficek, PE will travel to Shenzhen, China later this week, for the CTBUH 2019 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference.

Basel will present on The Future of Tall Building Renovation, and Steficek will chair the Jury for the 2019 CTBUH Renovation Awards.

ICYMI, or were not able to make it to the Chicago Architecture Center last month, GMS’s Ken Oen, P.E. (second from right) participated on a panel (from the left) with CTBUH‘s Antony Wood,  Mark Anderson, of the John Buck Company, and Benjy Ward, of Gensler  shown here with Lynn Osmond of the CAC (center). http://www.ctbuh.org/Events/CTBUHRelatedEvents/CACBuildingTallLecture/tabid/8117/language/en-US/Default.aspx

GMS understands tall buildings. Our engineers and architects are experts in not just the skyscraper’s “bones” (the structure), but its “skin” (the envelope) as well.

On October 22^nd, Achim Hermes will travel to the annual Middle East Conference of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Dubai to participate in a panel discussion about “skinning tomorrow’s skyscrapers.”

GMS is providing building envelope consulting (facades and roofs) for the new 58-story luxury residential condominium at 130 William Street. The facade is comprised of precast concrete wall panels with factory-installed windows.

The Urban Land Institute (New York) has awarded this year’s Excellence in Mixed Use Development to 252 East 57th Street. GMS provided façade and roofing consulting services for this new 56-story building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

75 Rockefeller Plaza received an Honorable Mention in the 2017 Reconstruction Awards. One of the longest-running reconstruction project awards programs (34 years), BD+C’s Reconstruction Awards honor the nation’s best historic preservation, adaptive reuse, renovation, and reconstruction projects, based on overall design, engineering, and construction project quality.

The Judges in the 2018 Engineering Excellence Awards Competition have selected the 75 Rockefeller Plaza for an ACEC New York Platinum Award in the category of Structural Systems.