Construction and Culture of The Alcoa Building
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Abstract
The Alcoa Building is a term used to denote a magnificent, 30-storey, 410 feet building. Now popularly referred to as the Regional Enterprise Tower, the building is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally, the head offices for the Aluminum Company of America were situated in this building. Since then, the company has built another building and transferred its headquarters there, leaving the Regional Enterprise Tower to government agencies and other private investors. There are regional not-for-profit institutions that have rented space in this enormous skyscraper. This giant structure is a brief walk down Sixth Avenue, off the Ross Street entrance of Subway Station Steel Plaza.
The Alcoa Building
The Alcoa Building is a unique skyscraper that was built from 1951 to 1953. It was designed to hold the headquarters of the Aluminum Company of America. The name of the skyscraper has since changed to the Regional Enterprise Tower. It was supposedly the first skyscraper that is all-aluminum. The walls are wholly made from aluminum. It occupies a vast area, moving across the North Shore to the Allegheny. From most angles, the structure looks like an enormous stack of television sets. Nevertheless, with the attractive, modernist lines of vegetation in Mellon Square that makes the foreground, one is able to picture how the construction must have appeared in the imagination of the architect.
The construction of this building saw the revolutionary use of the metal aluminum in the history of architecture. The attractive aluminum walls of the skyscraper are only eighth of an inch thick, a property that gives it not only an economical design but also a lightweight. There is also an X design on every spandrel panel. Its entire facade is sheathed in aluminum panels that are stamped. Everything else, including the windows, frames and sashes, ventilating and heating ducts, wiring system, and water piping are all made using aluminum. Interestingly, the aluminum windows can rotate 360 degrees to ease their washing; they are cleaned from the inside. Alcoa Building, with the glimmer it shows when the sun shines on it, has been a magnificent addition to the skyline that marks the City of Pittsburgh.
Of all of the civilizations in the United States, few have been as mysterious as the Rusyns of Pittsburgh. So convoluted is this civilization that they could come up with infrastructural projects that resemble modern architectural designs early in the 1950s. No one knows precisely how civilized these people were, but it was amongst them that the Alcoa Building mushroomed. The building was made of aluminum entirely to reflect the owners of the building: dealers of aluminum, or the Aluminum Company of America. Carpatho-Rusyns is the culture of this group of people, and it is also known as Ruthenes. They hail from a place that includes parts of southern Poland, eastern Slovakia, as well as the foothills of the Carpathian hills in western Ukraine.
At one time, Pittsburgh launched a civic revitalization and clean air project the local people called the "Renaissance." The city’s industrial base expanded continually through the 1950s, but after 1951 international competition led to the unavoidable collapse of the steel manufacturing industry. This was associated with massive mill closures and subsequent layoffs. Headquarters of top corporate moved out in the 1950s, which made the city lose its status as a major hub of transportation in 1952. It was during this period that the Aluminum Company of America erected the Alcoa tower. The population of the city of Pittsburgh then was 2.4 million, with over 65 percent being Native Americans. Despite the flourishing education, medicine, service, high tech sectors, and arts, Pittsburgh continued to face numerous problems, including crime, pollution, and poverty.
The Alcoa Building was designed and built by Harrison & Abramovitz. This has been a well known American architectural firm since 1941. The firm’s headquarters are based in New York City. It is a partnership of Max Abramovitz and Wallace Harrison. From time immemorial, this firm was well known for building many other modernist corporate towers on midwestern cities and the east coast. Most of these constructions, unlike the Alcoa Building, are straightforward. A notable stylistic innovation of the Harrison & Abramovitz is the use of stamped aluminum panels for the facade, initially at the Alcoa Building of 1953 in Pittsburgh. The Aluminum Company of America contracted the firm shortly after 1951, when news of their expertise hit the air following the successful completion of the United Nations complex. Here, it was reported they did a remarkable job, and it was expected they would do the same in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Pittburgh’s assignment was not that straightforward: these architects were instructed to design the enormous tower entirely of aluminum, with exceptions for the structural steel. In 1953, the work was complete and Harrison & Abramovitz became renowned for building a 30-story skyscraper from pressed, pre-fabricated aluminum panels. They used the same materials for Republic Center Tower I in 1953, which is located in Dallas. The firm has also been credited with building the Socony-Mobil Building in New York City in 1956.
Initially, Harrison and Abramovitz practiced as design architects but worked independently. Many projects in the United States are attributable to one or the other. For example, the magnificent buildings at Urbana’s University of Illinois and alma mater are Abramovitz's designs. Those by Harrison at the State Plaza Empire commanded the attention of the latter almost exclusively for over 15 years. This implies the other designs of the partnership in the named period are attributable primarily to Abramovitz. After 1976, the architect Abramovitz chose to start partnering with other professionals.
The material used for the Alcoa building, aluminum, has a number of unique properties for designing the appearance, finish, and shape of the building. An even more important property for modern buildings this material offers is sustainability. The demand for solutions to green building increasing is increasingly rapidly, in case the building needs to be repaired, or additional installations added. It has also become evident the components and designs of this material reduce carbon emissions and enhance energy efficiency while helping to achieve standards of green building (Faibish, 2008).
With aluminum, Alcoa has been able to install innovative ultra thermal cladding solutions that are of high performance. This is achieved when features of the unique glass, which also forms part of the materials that make the building, preserve the merits of high-performance. Because the surface finishes are highly reflective, allowance for efficient management of light and lower consumption of energy is given. This makes it possible for the building to remain cool even in the hottest weather. This advanced facade helps to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from the building while decreasing the consumption of energy. The alloy making up the roof is weather-proof, immune to the bad impact of ultraviolet rays from the sun, and corrosion-resistant. This ensures there is optimal performance for a very long time. Overall, the good building design of the Alcoa building –with aluminum as the main material- offers comfort and enhanced productivity of office staff allowing by direct access to daylight, delivering natural ventilation, as well as providing an outdoor view for the occupants of the building.
Notably, whenever a renovation is necessary, some of aluminum in the damaged part of the building is recycled. The advantage of aluminum as a material of construction is that building products can be recycled into identical products repeatedly with little or of loss of quality. Aluminum making up the Alcoa building is no exception; it has unmatched recyclability, which gives an architect the ability to do the designing with lifecycles of cradle-to-cradle in mind. This helps to achieve the so-called green building standards.
How Alcoa Building would be Built if it was Built Today
As it is today, the Alcoa building is known internationally as a post-world war international style skyscraper. Harrison and Abramovitz ’s firm used aluminum for all facades of the building as a way of promoting aluminum, which was Alcoa’s the only product. It has foregone historical decoration in favor of aluminum and glass panels that sheath the walls. At one corner is an entrance pavilion made of aluminum and glass. There are also a two-part clad tower to the sides and the back of the aluminum pavilion. Separating and dividing the towers are vertical bays and a raised seam.
If it were today, such a building would be built in an extremely different way because various architectural breakthroughs have been made since then. The design today will be such that the skyscraper can clean itself by devouring the smog that forms around it. The panel that will facilitate the cleaning is a coil-coated architectural item. Reynobond, short for Reynobond with EcoClean, as the item is called helps to clean not only the building but also the air around it. Apart from reducing the cost of maintenance, the self-cleaning system will help decompose pollutants like smog that cling to surfaces.
The technology this system uses is very effective. Approximately 20,000 square feet of such panels have the potential to clean the air, in addition to 100 medium-sized deciduous trees. It can also offset about 5 automobiles every day. It is fascinating to even imagine the applications of such green construction technology. Alcoa Building will glimmer a little brighter. An ultra-high skyscraper of this category would not require hiring of daring cleaners maintain floor-to-ceiling windows transparent and clean. At the core of the concept, however, is a proprietary process meant to take the patented Hydrotect technology. This process will help to keep microorganisms at bay on the building’s bathtubs, toilets, and other toilet fixtures. It applies a hydrophilic coating of titanium dioxide on a painted aluminum surface of the Reynobond panel. The result will be a panel, which, in the presence of ultraviolet light, catalyzes the breakdown of pollutants of organic nature on its surface, as well as in the air around the building. Once the organic matter decomposes, rainwater rinses it.
A few sections can also be made from brick-clad. However, the most part should have its facade material as aluminum and stainless steel. This design, coupled with 7,000 panels of glass would form a three-dimensional treatment, to give the facade some ‘rusticated’ effect. Apart from the aesthetic role the design would play aesthetic role and the architect’s desire for a permanent facade treatment, it also has a practical function; it would ensure the facade plating does not bend. The net result would be a magnificent building set on a thirty-storey base clad in a beautiful glass, with through-building arcades and retail spaces. The lobby would be vaulted to reflect the arched entrances, and a terrazzo decor and white marble would be installed.
There are panels, some of which are the latest in a series of materials for construction. Whether it is cement, paint, or tile, these panels are touted for their ability to fight air pollution. Such panels would also be installed if the Alcoa building was being built today. The tiles for the ceiling would be the kind that gets rid of formaldehyde, a chemical which is associated with a myriad of human health problems. These tiles have gotten certified by an independent group called UL that does non-profit testing for building materials. For purposes of lighting, the kind of bulbs used would be the ionic ones, like those manufactured by Zevotek, a Florida-based company, but now available in enormous stores across the United States. This system of lighting is an energy-efficient one compared to the fluorescent lamps and contain air purifiers for elimination of allergens, smoke, pollen, and dust. However, before such installations are fitted in building, the claims that microbe elimination are possible should be made with a lot of caution while undergoing validation by autonomous academic laboratories.
The coating on the panels of Alcoa building would be used on concrete like the TX Active product. Nitrogen oxides such as these, which are reduced with concrete, are extremely important. They can deactivate the smog-causing compound that automobiles emit. All these features act to lower the maintenance costs for this commercial building by reducing dirt and water. Today these panels are going at about 5 percent more than identical ones made of aluminum (Cooke, 2010).
The floor plates for the office would be contiguous, as large as 30,000 square feet, as well as uninterrupted by permanent fixtures such as vertical shafts. All service cores would stand outside floors of the office in order to allow a long span stacking of 60 fee and unencumbered loft spaces for use as flexible open layout offices. For greater comfort of working in such expansive space, there would be optimization of penetration of natural daylight. In addition, a downtown skyline and view to the river would be optimized by having an extremely generous ceiling height. Utilizing the whole transparency of the colorless, non-reflective, and ultra-clear glass would add to the visibility (Stegmeier, 2008).
All vertical surfaces of the building would be bared to the metal skeletons in order to allow urbanity and nature. Both of these are the congested forms that are irreconcilable. They can permeate inside the interior of the tower deeply, into the wall-less landscape of flexible and open workstations. The deep perimeter cantilevers and the lack of corner columns in the tower would provide a sense of exposure and openness. The relentless dimensions of the floors of the office would further heighten these, the footprints of which are modulated in their length. The effect would be an echo of the geometries of the identical catenary bridges that frame the site. Perimeter cores on the southern side of the skyscraper would service these light, airy, open floor spaces with undetermined interiors. Electric, telecommunication, as well as air cables would be fed to the open offices through a plenum-floor system, the modular space providing an efficient cabling arrangement and good air distribution for a conducive working environment.
The building would be planned with the spaces and components arranged in a way that intensifies the productive aspects of corporate responsibilities like consolidation, overexposure, communication, teamwork, fluidity, and random chances of daily work. Such building arrangements often seek to unleash an informal, accessible, catalytic, and adaptable workspace. This makes the place conducive to interactions in the office, which is an agent for unpredictable adaptations in business processes. Overall, organization of the tower would be straightforward, clearly expressed, and utilitarian. It would be an unmediated layering of separate elemental and linear volumes: the thin vertical-slab, the skyline-silhouette, and the serpentine block. Such parallel alignment of buildings would occur along the parallel alignments of the landscape.
Outside the skyscraper, layers of beautiful orchards and rows of well aligned trees and stone walls would connect the building to the water. Such trees and shrubs would be native and water-based. There would also be parallel strips of reclining surfaces that provide a descent from the outlying bridges and streets to the river, clarifying the tower’s organizational strategy further. These strips would stage a series of distinct waterfront situations: looking down, overlooking, viewing across, dipping one's finger into the water, and strolling. The organizational strategy would be clear, and this would be facilitated by the juxtaposition of the various skins of the volumes of the skyscraper. The serpentine block would be wrapped by a glass-paper into one extruded prism the vertical one sheathed on the external side by frosted glass, and the skyline-silhouette one clad in a metal jacket of panels.
The curtain-wall would comprise unitized frames with straight glass modules and shadow-boxes. These filigrees would be made of aluminum, as is the vertical panel that clads the blind-walls. The interstitial, left-over area between the juxtaposing volumes would become expressed clearly. This third one would be a linear void in-between the blocks and the circulation-slabs(Frantz, 2012).
The circulation lightwell would be made vertical and be made the main entrance into of the tower. This space provided by this wedge would be capped in a glass that encloses a beautiful courtyard. The external wall of the panel block would continue inside of the skyscraper, despite being very porous. The transport machines, escalators and elevators, would be sheathed in transparent in order to expose the mechanics and moving parts of the machinery inside. This machinery is known to be fragile, kinetic, and transparent, further inducing dynamism and fragility. The glass-wedge would be the most enormous structure of the tower. This least programmed portion of the building or non-building, would be the beacon of the Alcoa building. It would highlight what is crucial, the mundane albeit most important activities inside the skyscraper. This is free-flow communication and free-fall circulation, which form the basis of personnel interactions in all its improvisations (Frantz, 2012).
Such design comprising glass, aluminum, and steel framework would be governed by the desire to look for the most viable solution of preventing destruction due to seismic forces. The panels on the exterior side would be placed 32 feet outside the wall façade of the curtain. The only members coming directly from underground would be the principal columns, spaced at 60 feet while the diagonal bracing and the intermediate columns end above the entrance. The members on the exterior side would be clad in anodized aluminum and bronze.