Facade woven wire fabric COURTYARD

triangular meshsilver-coloredpanel

The World Trade Center area hotel is accented with a beautiful mesh sunshade for the lower floors and an architecturally arresting podium that was an innovative solution for meeting city regulations. Zoning in lower Manhattan requires street walls to be held to 85 feet, meaning buildings cannot be set back until they rise above that height. By creating a metal mesh screen, designers struck the right balance to convince city officials that it was a both a wall and window that met zoning and building codes. Pulling back the interior walls then created right-sized guest rooms and gave designers 3,600 square feet of usable floor-area-ratio that was redistributed to a roof top bar. In place, the mesh shades guest rooms on floors 1-5 and still allows views of the September 11 memorial. "The mesh allowed us to do the seemingly impossible: create a single element that could function as both a solid wall and open window. We were able to satisfy legal requirements, meet the demands of the city, give the developers the rooms they needed, strategically optimize square footage, and clad our podium in a unique glowing veil that transforms from day to night."Danny Forster, Architect