100 Eleventh Avenue’s main facade, on South and West side of the lot, is made of three parts: -the Tower façade is set back from the lot line and composed of two planes parallel to the streets and a curved surface; -the « Street Wall » is a vertical wall 6 floors high at the lot line; -and the “box” facades, which are perpendicular to the streets and define three « atriums », outdoor and public spaces contained between the Street Wall and the Tower.
This facade is a patchwork of 1750 squared or rectangular windows of 32 different dimensions and all tilting in different directions, in order to capture and reflect as much light, as many colors as possible. 200 of these windows are operable.
From a construction point of view, this facade is a unitized curtain wall system divided into 210 oversized units baptized « megapanels ». Each megapanel, entirely prefabricated in Southern China, is made of several windows, and indexed on the partition walls, in order to avoid any joint inside a room. Three slightly different types of glass are used throughout the façade, but it is practically invisible from inside.
A megapanel is made of 4 layers. From the inside : the structural layer, made of rectangular steel tubes ; a second layer of steel elements welded to the first one, generating the angled geometry; the 3rd layer is the aluminium window frames and glass ; finally, the layer of the outer caps, made of aluminium extrusions, which has a particularly complex geometry, breaching the gaps between all the planes created by the tilting of the windows. All layer are painted silver grey.
The « back » facade is made of oversized black flamed bricks, and punch windows of different sizes; they too are tilting in different directions.
The glass facade give a wide open and luminous view of the River ; At the opposite, the North facade offers framed views of Mid Town Manhattan.
