Best of 2006 Awards
IAC/InterActive Corp. Headquarters
AWARD OF MERIT: Office
 Building the new, 10-story East Coast headquarters for IAC/InterActive Corp., a media company with various consumer Web site brands, involved a difficult site, various construction surprises, and a complex Frank Gehry design.
“It’s one of the most innovative office buildings in America being built right there on the West Side,” one Best of 2006 juror said.
The $100 million project, which includes a 94-space underground parking garage, is located between 18th and 19th streets in Manhattan, across 11th Avenue from Chelsea Piers. It will consolidate more than 600 employees.
An early task for the project team entailed detoxification of the site, which had housed a manufactured gas works plant more than a century ago, by putting the soil through a burning process. The team also found an old marine pier during sitework, requiring the removal of virgin timber cribs and granite boulders through secant drilling, hand excavation, and chainsaw cuts.
The flat-plate concrete structure, built on a two-day cast-in-place pour cycle, has 12 unique floor plates and columns that shift location as they move up the building, giving it the appearance of movement, but also offering more floor space.
To stabilize the 200,000-sq.-ft. structure and balance out the twisting effect of the columns, the team installed reinforced concrete shear walls in the core.
One of the building’s signature features is the glass exterior curtain wall, which creates dramatic angles and impressive views for the interior offices.
The façade consists of 1,400 panels, 1,000 of which are cut in irregular trapezoidal shapes and sizes. Each panel is made of several glass “sandwiches” – a three-layer system of laminated glass, one face of which has an original frit pattern silkscreen on it.
The one-of-a-kind curtain wall required many iterations of design and construction review. Although the team prepared for the possibility that some glass would break during the erection of the curtain wall, in the end, it managed to install most of the pieces without incident.
“It was fabulous,” one juror said.
Key Players
Owner: IAC; Georgetown Co.
Construction Manager: Turner Construction
Design Architect: Gehry Partners
Architect: Adamson Associates
Interior Architect: Studios Architecture
Curtain Wall: Permasteelisa
Structural Engineer: DeSimone Consulting Engineers
M-E-P Engineer: Nelson Air
Plumbing Contractor: Pace Plumbing
Electrical Contractor: Wade Electric
Geotechnical Engineer: Langan Engineering and Environmental Services |
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