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News & Updates

The Steven Spielberg-produced documentary Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero features Snøhetta's September 11th Memorial Museum, stainless steel cladding by Zahner.

Announcing the Zahner-KME joint venture for the European Market. Read the Press Release at the JV site. Zahner-KME in Joint Venture

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The Zahner App is now available for iPhone. Features hundreds of projects by artists and architects. iPhone App

Zahner Campus North Dock Expansion has won the Monsters of Design Honor Award; designed by Crawford Architects' Stephen Colin and Michael O'Donnell.

The North American Copper Awards has recognized Zahner's copper metal-work for the Waipolu Gallery in Oahu, Hawaii.

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Announcing the winners for the Biennial ZAHNER + KCAI Art and Sculpture Competition at KCAI.

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Tessellate™ kinetic metal surfaces by Zahner and ABI released: visually stunning and environmentally responsible.

Bill Zahner named an Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects.

Introducing the Hands of the Artist™ division, where Zahner engineers and craftsmen produce projects for artists.
Visit Zahner's Hands of the Artist website

Cooper Union

Cooper Union's New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square

Cooper Union's 175,000-square-foot, $111.6 million addition, known simply by its street address, 41 Cooper Square, covers the full block on Third Avenue from East 6th to East 7th in downtown Manhattan, bordering the East Village. Although it is roughly the same size as Cooper Union's foundation building diagonally across from Cooper Square, its futuristic façade is strikingly different in style and unlike anything else around it.

A vertical piazza—the central space for informal social, intellectual and creative exchange—forms the heart of the new academic building. An undulating lattice envelopes a 20-foot wide grand stair which ascends four stories from the ground level through the sky-lit central atrium, which itself reaches to the full height of the building. This vertical piazza is the social heart of the building, providing a place for impromptu and planned meetings, student gatherings, lectures, and for the intellectual debate that defines the academic environment.


Model of the building's understructure.

Detail of the gorge which splits the building
 

Design Assist for Cooper Union

The architects at Morphosis brought Zahner onto the design team early in the process to provide design assist, a valuable engineering service that introduces intelligent connections and smart building practices to the facade design. Many of the projects completed by Zahner start at this phase, where architects provide a general model or drawings, and Zahner helps redefine the details for efficiency and trueness to the original design.

Zahner has a small team devoted to providing early assistance to projects such as the Cooper Union, where the complex design requires intelligent engineering early on in the project. As the project moved into the production phase, the project was engineered, drafted, and fabricated by Zahner as pre-assembled metal panels for quick installation on the building's surface in New York. The panels were shipped to New York City where local installers and Zahner partners W&W Glass installed the pre-fabricated panels over the course of a few months.

Zahner worked on two projects previously with Morphosis, the Eugene Federal Courthouse, and the Morphosis exhibit in Paris. Working with Thom Mayne and the architects at Morphosis on these projects lead to a certain kind of symbiosis between the engineering & fabricators at Zahner, and the architecture geniuses at Thom Mayne's Morphosis.

The Screen

From afar, the New Cooper Union Academic Building appears to have tall windows scattered all over its surface. As you draw closer, you realize that these little windows are actually sheets of stainless steel, and it is the rest of the building which is the window. Perforated stainless steel with a mechanically-applied Angel Hair™ finish adorns the entire facade of 41 Cooper Square.

The perforated metal skin surrounding the entirety of the building serves several sustainability purposes: It controls sunlight penetration during the Summer to reduce the influx of heat radiation, while serving as an insulating barrier in cold weather, further reducing energy loss. Thom Mayne used similar screens as energy-saving devices before, and this one promises a 50% reduction in heat load.

Construction of Cooper Union

Below is a time-lapse video showing the panel systems at Cooper Union being installed by local installers in New York City.

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