A new office building in Washington DC will feature an innovative mullion-free, hyper-transparent glass façade of concaved glass panels.
Designed by America's REX Architecture, 2050 M Street will be situated in the city’s Golden Triangle Business District, an area of varied architectural styles including Beaux Arts, Neoclassical, Art Deco and Brutalist.
REX have attempted to reconcile these competing typologies with a hyper-transparent, floor to ceiling glass, without any mullion impeding the view. The panels appear scooped or concave from the outside, establishing that an all-glass building can also have a high-relief facade befitting of the nation’s capital.
The facade has been constructed using approximately 900 identical, insulated glass panels, each measuring 3.2 metres tall by 1.5 metres wide and curved to a 2.9-metre radius. The rigid panels only need to be fixed to floor plates at the top and bottom.
The glass is treated on the exterior with a subtly-reflective pyrolytic coating and the insulating cavity is coated with a high-performance, low-E coating, reducing solar gain and meeting the building’s thermal performance requirements.
The REX-designed 2050 M Street office building is scheduled to open in 2019.
Images: Luxigon/ Courtesy of REX
