WilkinsonEyre are delighted to receive first prize of in the international The Metals in Construction magazine 2020 Design Challenge, in a team including façade consultants Eckersley O’Callaghan and facade contractor Josef Gartner GmbH.
The international ideas competition invited design proposals to upgrade an aging, energy-inefficient high-rise office building at 63 Madison Avenue to comply with NYC’s Green New Deal goals and create a more desirable space for companies competing for highly skilled employees. The challenge addresses how to transform New York City’s high-rise office buildings, most of which are now more than a half a century old, but will still be standing in 2030, a milestone year on the city’s roadmap to carbon neutrality. The brief was to use a cladding solution to half the building’s energy consumption, bring daylight deeper into the building and give better access to the outside.
The WilkinsonEyre scheme, called Second Skin, employed the concept of an ‘adaptive net’ facade; creating a habitable area within a highly efficient, simple, regular cladding system. The ‘adaptive net’ allowed us to respond to the specifics of the building’s locale; protect against seasonal environmental conditions; optimise views and introduce natural greening; all enhancing occupants’ wellness. A system of external shading/reflector devices was developed to provide shade, reduce glare, increasing the quality of daylighting and improving the usable area by 20%, whilst preserving views out. The engineers demonstrated through thermal modelling that this concept (combined with an improvement in the efficiency of M&E equipment), would offer a 50% reduction in carbon emissions as well as offer an embodied carbon offset after only four years. The proposed planting and vegetation will respond to light, heat, humidity and seasonal variations, and the baseline palette will be chosen to increase biodiversity and ecological resilience.
The team were commended for a solution that was simple, with applicability to a wide range of buildings, cost effective, and adaptive, so it can be tailored to suit different environments and orientations. We were also commended for considering the carbon impact of the system over its lifecycle and ensure that it makes a net positive contribution though its application; the design could be developed further to facilitate de-construction, and re-use.
The site and building were chosen because of being typical of a large swathe of American real estate of a similar type and period, meaning the winning solution has great potential replicability across the US
The award was announced at a half-day conference on Façade Transformation in New York City on Friday, March 6th, 2020. The full list of commendations is as follows;
Grand Prize Winner
WilkinsonEyre
Eckersley O’Callaghan
Josef Gartner GmbH
Finalists
“Active & Adaptive”
Priedemann Façade
“Blurring Scales”
Ayman Wagdy Mohamed Ibrahim BSc MSc PhD, Lecturer & Researcher (QUT, UQ, CARRS-Q)
Haitham Salah Ali Mahmoud BSc, Chief design officer (YBA architects)
Mostafa Aladdin BSc, freelancer architect
Waleed Gamal Eldin Mohamad Lotfy, BSc, Design Director (Mimar, Egypt)
Transformed Simplicity“
Schorn
“Atmospheric Veil”
READ Architecture Design
“Hidden in Plain Sight”
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Atelier Ten
Werner Sobek