Parikh Stevens Architects Principal Harsh Parikh: “We designed Vida with eight different skin materials to create a visually interesting mosaic pattern across the building’s face. Good quality of installation and interface among these disparate materials was critical to achieve our desired effect,” and equally important, to implement the most effective construction processes that ensured critical long-term durability and weatherproofing.
Every skin panel had to align perfectly with all the others, or the building face would take-on a wavy, distorted look that would ruin Vida’s face. To perfectly achieve this critical goal, Pinkard resorted to old-school craftsmanship.
Pinkard Sr PM Jess Becerra: “To get perfect alignment, we resorted to an old school measure-and-cut approach. We had our best carpenters either hanging from swing stages or standing on lifts, precisely measuring and laying out each skin panel.”
Pinkard dedicated 23 swing stages (which only covered Vida’s west face) to the skin installation effort, leaving them in place as long as necessary to give all trades and inspectors unimpeded access and to ensure exceptional quality control. Once the west- face skin was installed, inspected, and complete, the stages were moved-on to the other building faces.
This custom, in-field fabrication process resulted in perfectly aligned skin panels across Vida’s entire face. Don’t take our word for it, just take a look at the beautifully installed skin in our attached photos. We have included additional descriptions of our skin installation processes in Supplemental Materials.
