Merging of Glass and Wood

Sedak, the glass manufacturer in Gersthofen, Germany, evolved lamination capabilities - real wood veneers in a 7 meter façade - for renowned architecture firm SOM’s design of a 24-level high tower accommodating apartments, offices, and a representative lobby with an extensive and elegant design dominated by glass and eucalyptus wood.


Construction board
Location: 111 S. Main Office Building, Salt Lake City / US
Standard: green building (LEED gold)
Architects: SOM Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LPP, San Francisco, USA
Façade Contractor: Steel Encounters Inc, Salt Lake City, US
Completion: 09/2016

Sedak Scope
940m² glass façade (lobby):
Wood-veneer laminates, 7.0 m high (3 x 12 mm)
57 glass units (façade) up to 10.9 m high (2 x 12 mm)
46 glass fins and beams up to 10.9 m high

Nothing less than the perfect symbiosis of glass and wood – is what the architects of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) wanted for a new 24-level office building in Salt Lake City, USA. The wood installed in the façade of the lobby “grows into” the 7 meter high glass elements. Sedak, specialised in oversize formats, to make this architectural vision a reality, developed a lamination technique that allows the German glass manufacturer to laminate real wood veneers in between the glass layers. Hence, the visual appearance is original and the wood permanently protected by the glass.

The architects had a clear vision of the office skyscraper’s lobby, which would have precious wood components that merge with 7 meter high glass elements. However, something like that had never been done before. The first suggestion was to use a photorealistic print, but was quickly rejected because the result of a print seemed not real enough to the architects. Therefore, the solution was to laminate real wood veneers in between the glass units’ layers. Then, integrating a natural, organic material in a glass unit without causing any damages during one of the production steps (e.g. tempering furnace), or losing visual quality almost sounded like a Herculean task. Thanks to a lot of experience and know-how in laminating glass, and a close cooperation of everybody involved, sedak found a way.

By letting the wood appear as if it was inserted within the glass, the building evolves its own effect. To manufacture such glass units, several challenges had to be met:

The raw material wood – eucalyptus in this case – is organic. It reacts to climatic changes like humidity and temperature and could shrink, become wavy, or burn. The lamination process (100° Celsius) had to be fine-tuned to be adjusted to the raw material.

Due to the warming in the autoclave, the SG interlayer gets smooth and the wood veneers on it change their position. But the final result had to show laminates being incorporated absolutely parallel wood veneers.

Wood veneers are only available in upto 3 m. For the 7 m high glass units, horizontal joints were therefore necessary.

The inspiration for the transparent façade was the Apple Cube – a perfect all-glass structure. The client demanded a transparent supporting structure for the project. Glass and wood define the appearance of the entire lobby. The required glass fins reach a height of nearly 11 m.
Maic Pannwitz, Executive Vice President, Sedak office, New Jersey

Laminating wood in a glass unit – the technology until now, was only available in small formats and used in furniture designing e.g. for table tops. Façades with wood veneers had not been produced before – at least, I have not heard of any project. Statically, triple laminates would have been sufficient. However, we decided to use a four-layer build-up with a redundant piece of glass for the roof. That made the statics independent of the wood.

For logistics, the 7 m glass units were shipped in special wooden crates. In Salt Lake City, the temporary storage was located nearby which was perfect because they partly had to block traffic lanes for the transport to the site – but not only for our glass.