Eight Spruce Street

The remarkable wavy façade of Eight Spruce Street – a residential building in Lower Manhattan – rises high into the New York cityscape.

Architect Frank Gehry designed Eight Spruce Street from the inside out, focusing on the views over the city to make the most of residents’ visual relationship with the surrounding panorama. The bay windows that open out from the façade offer an unrivalled, unimpeded vista of New York. The building’s six-storey podium houses a public school, medical offices and residential amenities.

Brand: Permasteelisa North America

Architect: Gehry Partners

Owner & developer: Forest City Ratner Companies

Contractor: Kreisler Borg Florman General Construction

The project

The concept

Gehry offset the floors, creating a soft series of waves enveloping the building. An undulating steel façade curves along three elevations of the building (the south elevation is flat). The windows are rectangular, but their widths vary to match the shifting profile of the façade, creating numerous bay windows.

What did we do?

We designed, engineered, manufactured and installed 40,000 sqm of stainless steel and glass curtain wall for the complex skin shape of Eight Spruce Street. By separating the internal air/water barrier and the external metal cladding, we were able to create a free-moving curtain wall out of a complex double envelope, while retaining the benefits of them working together as a single system. In total, we supplied 10,911 rectangular panels (of which just 1,900 are the same), 3,746 curved and flat units to create the stainless steel contours, and 5,177 shaped spandrel units incorporating glass.