A stainless steel stair with glass guardrails, back-painted glass feature wall and pedestal for the New York headquarters of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, one of Spain’s largest banks.
We provided design assist services, supplied and installed the feature stair, as well as the feature wall, guardrails and pedestal.
Renowned Architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP envisioned a monolithic stainless steel stair with no visible welds or fasteners. With their vision as our guide, we developed a structural system that could be prefabricated to match the required fit and finish, and then knocked it down and delivered it to the 42nd floor of a Manhattan office tower.
While we don’t have proof, we suspect our delivery path took us up New York City’s smallest freight elevator. The tiny elevator severely limited the maximum size of our modules, which meant we had to do much more splicing on-site. We couldn’t weld these splices due to cost, schedule and quality constraints. Instead, thanks to an ultra-precise HD-BIM model, we created an all-bolted structure.
Machined spacers, couplers and nodes were bolted to stringers and tread connections. We carefully balanced hole depth, thread engagement, telegraphing and capacity in order to realize the architects’ vision under very trying circumstances.
