The old sugar factory
In 2012, Two Trees Management Company – a $ 4 billion family business, based in New York, that already manages 2,000 apartment units and 3 million square feet of commercial space – purchased the one hundred and fifty-year-old decommissioned Domino Sugar factory just across from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Their intent was to develop a series of residential and commercial buildings that would use modern design techniques to hark back to the historic, industrial past of the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn, thus creating a vibrant neighbourhood community.
Sustainable solution
In purchasing the old Domino Sugar factory in New York (US) and transforming it into a series of residential and commercial buildings, Two Trees Management Company has once again made their philosophy “people prosper when neighbourhoods bloom” come true. To secure the unique façade of the building, the customer used the NV3 hidden fastening system from NVELOPE®, to create not just an eye-catching feature on the Brooklyn Skyline but also a solution that will last for a very long time.
The transformation
The first of five buildings built as part of this new neighbourhood welcomed its first tenants in the summer of 2017. The building is enveloped by a façade of perforated panels, fabricated from raw copper and zinc sourced from Bulgaria and France, which are attached to the building’s exterior walls by the NVELOPE® NV3 hidden-fastening system.
NVELOPE® becomes an engineering partner
According to the Two Trees architect and project manager Mark Dwyer, the entire building was modelled using 3D GPS. Every panel, bracket, and rail of this bespoke façade system was mapped to a specific location on the building. This level of sophistication and complexity caused Mark and his team to search for a façade support system partner whose engineering and design expertise would add value above and beyond the component price. The NVELOPE® team of Welwyn Garden City UK proved to be the ideal partner to meet Mark’s needs.
The challenge
Despite the building’s exterior cascading visual effect, all façade panels needed to create a smooth vertical plane, where panels were plumb with one another to enable their interconnection. Because of the truly unique “helping hand” feature of the NVELOPE® bracket, which allows for 40 mm of façade panel adjustability, contractors were able to achieve the smooth vertical planes of the façade panels during the installation process across the wide spans of the building.
A long lasting and jointly developed solution
Ultimately, the NVELOPE® team was able to partner with the Two Trees Management Company to support their vision of creating a building that will stand as a hallmark for a flourishing community. One hundred years from now, when the brilliant zinc and copper façade panels age like the patina seen on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, the NV3 system, made of highquality anodised rails with great corrosion resistance, will still be supporting the panels that have seen generations of people prosper in a blooming neighbourhood.
