Fear factor. That was the obstacle the New York Times and its New York–based architect, FXFOWLE, faced when it was time to bid the curtain wall for the media giant’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Design architect Renzo Piano conceived of a brise-soleil made of horizontal rods to project 18 inches from the curtain wall. Simple in concept, confounding in execution, when one imagines finding a strategy that would work for a 52-story tower. “While this approach has been achieved on a smaller scale in Europe, it had never been attempted at such a large scale in the U.S.,” confirms Daniel Kaplan, AIA, senior principal at FXFOWLE.
Contractors rely on precedent and predictability when preparing bids. Since the project’s curtain wall was innovative, it lacked both of these safety values. The architect and the client were correct to assume that curtain-wall contractors would approach the bidding with trepidation, which is to say that when fear is a factor, bids tend to soar; it is an understandable fact of risk management. As far as the client was concerned, however, keeping costs under control was paramount. Considering that a building’s envelope accounts for about 20 percent of the total construction cost, any precautionary padding of the estimates would result in unacceptable increases in overall construction costs.
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