EFFICIENCY
A Building-wide Glass Retrofit at the Empire State Building Is Completed as Part of Traditional Upgrades
WRITTEN BY | CHRISTINA KOCH
and solar heat gain. Windows were an obvious consideration.” Because the Empire State
Building was about to become a world-famous sustainability project, the team kept a close eye on reusing materials and equip- ment before buying new. The building’s 6,514 existing windows had been installed just 14 years previously. Although they were composed of tempered double- pane glass, the gas that had existed in the evacuated space between the panes had broken down, so the insulation value was lost. The aptly named provocateur,
The Why of Windows As part of Malkin’s charge to
improve the Empire State Build- ing’s marketability, a plan was set forth to expand air condi- tioning in the building. When air conditioning was installed in the building in 1953, only tenant spaces were conditioned, leaving elevators and hallways hot and uncomfortable in the summer. “Conditioning corridors was adding a lot of air-conditioning load to the central plant and would’ve made it too small to
serve the building,” explains Paul Rode, business development director for Johnson Controls. As a first step toward making
the Empire State Building energy efficient, Rode and the rest of the efficiency dream team looked for places in which load reductions could be achieved. “Before retrofit- ting or tuning a cooling plant, you must ensure you reduce the amount of cooling so you’re not setting the plant up for the wrong loads,” Rode says. “We needed to make the building envelope better in terms of insulation value
Rocky Mountain Institute, sug- gested rebuilding the existing windows onsite by adding a solar film and inert gas between the panes. The team further devel- oped the concept and decided to follow through.
Military Precision Working in occupied spaces in
which tenants pay an average rent of $40 per square foot, according to 2011 SEC Filings by Empire State Building Associates LLC, requires succinct scheduling and a choreographed procedure. “This was a pretty invasive proj- ect, and we couldn’t have tenants affected at all,” Rode recalls. “You just don’t take their windows
out and put new windows in because even if a paper is blown off a desk the wrong way, it’s a problem.” Rode adds the procedure was
practiced many times before actual work began. “You don’t do a job like this unless you practice every aspect of it like a military operation,” he says. “By the time we started, we had made mock- ups and sat down with the union guys, and talked about the best way to take the windows out and put them in. There were countless quality runs to ensure we had the process ready—no bubbles in the film, etc. It was well vetted. There were no surprises.” Each night, Serious Energy,
a division of Sunnyvale, Calif.- based Serious Materials, would remove 50 to 100 existing win- dows and replace them with new windows. The existing windows then would be transported to the fifth floor of the Empire State Building where a soundproof window refurbishment shop had been created. During the day, a crew of Serious Materials em- ployees operated the machinery that assisted in rebuilding the windows. First, the window frames were
pulled apart and the gaskets were scraped off the glass. The glass was cleaned and inspected. Then
May-June 2013 // RETROFIT 47
PHOTO: JOHNSON CONTROLS INC.
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