I said yesterday that we have a recent trend of small projects winning Lucy Moses awards. The second project that won an award this year where we were involved is quite large, but our role was small: the restoration of the stained glass windows at the Riverside Church in upper Manhattan. This project included “30 monumental lancet windows, 32 smaller lancet windows, and 12 rose windows. This [is] 6,917 square feet of stained glass, or 662,262 individual pieces of glass.” The glass is supported by limestone tracery.
Our role was to work with Walter B. Melvin Architects on the design and attachment of the outer protective glazing that sits between the relatively fragile art glass and the outside world, fastened to the stone. There had always been protective glazing present, but the old protection had not been designed for full wind load. While our work extended about a year and half from beginning to end, it was, boiled down, calculating the wind load on the protective glazing, and designing details for the protective glazing frames and anchors.
Obviously, our role in the project was small and should not be played up to be bigger than it was. On the other hand, our work was real and (thanks to our former engineer Gabi Pardo, now living in Brussels) successful. More importantly, nearly every project we work on has a team of design professionals and contractors. We don’t work in a vacuum and we don’t work alone. The project itself was great and deserves the award, and we’re proud to have been a (small) part of the team that made it happen.
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