THE PRINT & PROJECT – Creating a building size work of art

“This was one of the largest and the most challenging print project we’ve ever taken on. It’s the entire building,” says James Cole, Senior Project Manager at AGNORA.

The overall project consisted of over 16,500 sq.ft of custom Insulated Glass Units (IGU’s) including:

- 8050 sq.ft of custom printed frit.
- 8500 sq.ft of non-printed, high quality vision glass.

“An immense amount of work went into the pre-press of these glass prints. In fact, we had to develop a custom script to save about 6000 keystrokes, and possible errors.” says Joe Lindsey, AGNORA’s Print Technology Expert.

Every one of the 256 individual pieces were set up and ‘cut’ from a digital master elevation drawing. Subsequently, an AM print process was applied to the image to ensure that it remained visible from the exterior while allowing un-impeded vision from the inside out.

“Because we had to add a shadow to the original drawing, two separate print files had to be created to fulfill the client vision. Then manually, we combined each file back together for the printer to utilize. It was a highly involved, custom process,” said Lindsey.

Each piece of printed glass was cleaned and printed on AGNORA’s DipTech NEraD. Ceramic inks must go through a heat set process (heat strengthened or tempering) in order to fully cure. As such, the nature of these chemically based inks inhibits a wide colour gamut, and custom ratios must be prepared to closely match a client’s colour chip or pantone, as was the case with this highly specialized process.

MANAGING PROCESSES – Organizing production and delivery

The project began in July 2019, with sample ordered by the project owner Bernie Nimer and commenced production the following year - April 2020. The full-size samples helped the stakeholders realize the digital image aesthetic and how it would apply to the second, third and fourth floors of the structure to yield the subtle look the designers wished to achieve.

“Our production window was fairly narrow,” says Cole. “This is the first “full” [curtain wall] that AGNORA has been involved with. Not only is the non-printed glass oversized, but both printed and non-printed IGU’s had to have similar visual characteristics. It just made sense for AGNORA to handle the entire production.”.

For the “One Young” project, AGNORA had to accommodate a greater degree of scheduling. “With over 450 custom IGU’s, running between four services (print, tempering, IG, and shipping) we had to pay attention to scheduling and ensure that our processes ran seamlessly. It was a great exercise to handle the increase print load,” says Brent Stannard, Plant Manager at AGNORA. In addition, oversized custom glass always requires a refined arrangement of logistics. The order that glass is placed on each rack can have major implications on installation at site. AGNORA went beyond conventional packing and ensured that we fully understood the unique installation process and schedule to best rack glass so that lites were installed in sequence. This eliminated time and risk associated with “moving off,” ensuring a “one-touch” installation of each lite.

THE MAKEUP – Fabricating an efficient curtain wall

To maintain visual consistency all IGU’s has a makeup of:

6mm Pilkington low iron outboard, a 16mm stainless steel black spacer, and inboard a 6mm Guardian SKN 67/27 with performance coating on surface three.

On all 256 printed IGU’s, the frit was applied to surface two.

IGU’s ranged in size from 124” max height on printed, to 168” max height on non-printed.

The choice to use Guardian Glass’s SN 67/27 within the IGU was due to the performance characteristics of the glass. The two primary sides of the building face the South and West, and with a façade constructed almost entirely of glass, the use a product with lower transmittance and SHG was necessary.