- Project Statue of Liberty Museum and Statue of Liberty Secondary Screening Facility
- Location New York City, New York
- Type of Precast CarbonCast High Performance Insulated Wall Panels
- Project Size 50,000 sq.ft.
- Architect FXCollaborative Architects, New York, N.Y.
- Engineer DeSimone Consulting, Boston, Mass.
- Contractor Phelps Construction, Boonton, N.J.
- Owner Ellis Island Foundation, New York, N.Y.
- Awards 2020 Design Awards, Special Awards: Sustainable Design
- Precaster High Concrete Group, Denver, Pa.
At this iconic location now stands resilient structures that are dynamic in expression and were inspired by the irregularity of the water’s edge, as well as the geometry of the circular Flagpole Plaza.
This is a one of a kind museum and screening facility that leads precast structures into a new level of strength and beauty. Merging building into landscape, the design eschews formality in favor of an asymmetrical design that embraces its dramatic setting and changes of form as visitors move around it.
The vertical patterning of the precast concrete sandwich panels was inspired by the Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River. The project’s materials link the future of the Island with its past. Inspired by the idea that the museum has been “lifted” from the park, all vertical surfaces are rendered in irregular, vertical patterns suggestive of a tectonic shift; they provide a compositional counterpoint to the building’s dominant horizontality.
The precast concrete panels have a deeply textured, irregular pattern, which creates dramatic shadows of the cliffs. The high thermal mass of the concrete panels contributes to maintaining interior temperatures and minimizing the effects of outdoor temperature swings. In addition, special connection details continue to help minimize thermal bridging between interior and exterior building components. The sandwich panels range from 24” at the base to 16” thick as you move up vertically.
Sustainability was key to this design and precast was there to meet that need. The lowest level of the museum is hollow, unused space, that was designed to be floodable. The design was balanced around a 500 year flood plan. There are 84 rectangular cut-outs in the ground level allow for water to flow freely into the base level if needed. Taking away pressure to the panels and the structure during extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Sandy. The complexity of the site location and soil made for a challenging project. All products were transported by a barge to a dock built specifically for this project. The minimal site space needed for precast and efficiency in time was essential to the construction of the facilities
