Nashville, Tenn.
DESIGN TEAM:
Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Assocs.
JW Marriott Nashville is a 386-ft.-tall, 800,000-sq.-ft. luxury hotel nestled among the busy streets of Music City, USA. The hotel’s 33-story elliptical glass tower offers stunning views of the city from all 533 guest rooms, as well as a high-end restaurant.
While the curtainwall was originally specified in the design, YKK AP was able to customize its high-performing window wall product, the yww 50 TU Thermally Broken Window Wall System, to fit the job. Using a unique slab-edge cover, YKK AP was able to achieve the same look and feel as the curtainwall while providing a number of benefits only window wall can provide, including a highly customizable system to work with; a pre-glazing option that allowed as much of the installation to be done from the inside as possible; and higher acoustical performance that is key to high-rise hospitality projects.
As YKK AP engineers worked to customize the window wall system to form the hotel’s desired elliptical shape, they identified a total of 25 different angles within its continuously changing radius. The team found it could still achieve the same curvilinear design by using just three custom mullions that fit within each of the 25 angles, rather than creating 25 individual mullions. These uniform mullions hinged among themselves and successfully integrated a slab edge cover that changed to resemble the curtainwall while creating a fluid line to create its elliptical shape.
When it was time to remove the exterior crane, the mullions overlapped, so one more custom mullion was developed to close the façade and complete the exterior envelope.
Meeting energy codes with floor-to-floor and wall-to-wall glass was also a challenge. With the YWW 50 TU system, the glass pane is set to the front for thermal performance, which is enhanced by ykk ap’s MegaTherm thermal break. This allows the material to maintain structural integrity through a range of temperature fluctuations.
