Finishing Touches Being Added to Tallest Tower in Williamsburg

Posted on 11 August 2020

Williamsburg officially has a new tallest tower. The construction of Ten Grand Street also known as 260 Kent Avenue is visibly complete, with its impressive crystalline façade and two-legged structure proudly forming the first part of the redevelopment of the Domino Sugar Factory site. This mega project comprises a six-acre site which until now had been inaccessible to the community for over 160 years.

Ten Grand Street is a 45-story, 435-foot-tall tower designed by world-renowned architect COOKFOX for Two Trees Management. The tower features interlocking buildings with white precast concrete façade inspired by the molecular pattern of sugar crystals, giving recognition to the site’s history as a sugar factory.

This tower joins the SHoP Architects-designed and fully leased 325 Kent Avenue project which opened last year and is one extra piece in the puzzle in a bid to change the Brooklyn skyline and revitalise the riverside area into a thriving mixed-used community, connecting the neighbourhood’s industrial past with the present.

Windtech Consultants, headquartered in Sydney, have had the privilege of providing comprehensive wind engineering services on Ten Grand Street, with work being co-ordinated by their New York and London offices. Windtech Consultants conducted a Structural Loads and Building Motion Wind Tunnel Study using a modified Multi- High Frequency Pressure Integration (HFPI) Technique which Windtech’s technical team published in 2007. This technique enabled an accurate and definitive assessment of the wind loads on the structural frame as well as a set of equivalent-static load cases taking into consideration the effect of load transfer between dynamically independent substructures via the rigid link at Level 22. Key to the accuracy of the technique is the ability to provide a set of load cases for each interlocking building sub-structure using load transfer influence coefficients extracted from the FEA model developed by the New York, based structural consultants, RGCE. These influence coefficients provide clarity on how loads are transferred between the sub structures. Multi-substructure analysis is not new, however a key difference between the outputs provided by Windtech Consultants and other wind engineering firms, is the additional effort put into presenting only the critical load cases (i.e. in the case of Ten Grand Street, a total of 36 load cases across both sub-structures) governing the design rather than leave the structural consultant to sift through 300 load cases in the case where the less sophisticated technique is employed.

In addition, Windtech Consultants deployed a sophisticated directional method as part of the analysis for this tower which enables the highest possible accuracy and draws on the full set of directional extreme wind climate data. Other directional methods used with wind tunnel data can either under or overestimate the design loads. The building accelerations were also found to be within the prescribed comfort criteria which is generally expected for tall buildings that are structurally linked at high elevations. This is largely due to the lack of correlation of the peak wind actions on the sub-structures.

Windtech Consultants would like to congratulate the whole project team for delivering yet another fantastic project that will have a meaningful impact on the Brooklyn skyline and serve as one piece of the puzzle in this amazing redevelopment project for the lucky residents of Williamsburg.

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