This article should make you ill

A few comments from me below, but this is a very depressing article on so many levels.... and normally I would never put this much up here but cutting and pasting does not do this piece justice.
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THE SPRINT CENTER’S SKIN | Pane by pane, the downtown arena’s wall of glass comes together
A glittering curtain rises in KC

Next month, the final pane of glass will be put in place on the exterior of the Sprint Center downtown. Last week, Shane Tumlinson of Architectural Wall Systems attached one section of glass. For aesthetics, amber-colored panes are interspersed in the “curtain wall.”

Behold, direct from China, Kansas City’s Great Wall of Glass.

The shimmering surface of the Sprint Center is spreading fast, and views from the inside make the city look — believe it when you see it — happening.

“See that?” architect Craig Milde said, stepping from the main concourse into the arena’s bowl and pointing to a wide opening at the opposite end. There’s downtown, tapping on the glass. During a game, fans will see from their seats those shiny skyscrapers peeking in.

This view comes courtesy of workers in China’s Guangdong province, where the glass was poured and fitted.

Motorists today look at the arena and simply see glass going up. But there is a story behind it all.

It’s about the global economy. It’s about art. It’s about extreme precision, money, Customs agents, money, something called “frit” and its friend, money. It’s about erecting a durable and visually striking “curtain wall” without running out of … you know.

“We were able to provide Kansas City a spectacular facility and still make it cost effective,” boasted Gina Leo, a spokeswoman for HOK Sport, one of the local architectural firms that collaborated on the arena’s design.

The story begins a year ago on the floor of an old brick building at 18th and McGee streets.

Skin game

For many nights, Milde, 40, sat on the floor of the Downtown Arena Design Team’s office, giant sheets of paper and colored markers spread around him.

Ryan Gedney, a project designer then in his 20s, stared at an arena mock-up on a computer screen and rattled off: “One-third left. Two-thirds right. Clear. Two-thirds left …”

With each instruction, Milde worked his colored markers in an elaborate tic-tac-toe game on 2,204 tiny squares.

Each square represented a pane of glass. The pattern on paper ultimately stretched 30 feet, covering the floor like a multicolored bar code.

This pattern would appear on the arena’s “skin” — a wrap of flat glass panes bordered by aluminum strips.

From a distance, the panes on the $276 million arena appear identical — rectangular, roughly 12 feet by 5 feet … just slap them on. In fact, all but a few dozen are unique — each of them designed for a precise spot, and no other spot, on the building’s skin.

Each pane had to be numbered. To fit correctly on the oval exterior, many panes were slightly wider at the bottom than at the top, or vice versa. All told, the design team ordered 128 sizes.

“If you break one putting it up, you can’t just use the next pane in the stack,” a construction worker said last week.

Then there’s the frit factor.

“Frit” is fabricated into some panes to provide a dappled effect, a subtle shade from the sunbeams. Round bits of ceramic paint, the size of paper-punch holes, make up the frit. Bunched vertically, they form straight fields of gray covering one-third or two-thirds of an otherwise clear pane.

Most of the frit will be found on the sunny side.

To jazz things up aesthetically, 66 panes are amber-colored. (The designers originally pitched a shade of chartreuse, but Mayor Kay Barnes preferred amber.)

It’s curtains for sure

When bids for the glass were let, planners estimated the cost at $11.2 million. No bid came in at less than $11.5 million, so the package was rebid with suggestions to cut costs.

Enter Architectural Wall Systems Co. of Des Moines, Iowa. AWS erected the blue-green glass on The Kansas City Star’s Press Pavilion, across the freeway from the arena.

AWS does “curtain walls.”

Shiny and generally more affordable than solid load-bearing walls, curtain walls have been around for a century. (The first in Kansas City were in the Boley Building, built in 1909 at 11th and Walnut streets.)

The distinguishing feature of curtain walls, physics-wise, is that they don’t hold up a building.

A curtain-wall expert — Patrick Loughran of the Chicago architectural firm Goettsch Partners — said elephants could charge through the Sprint Center concourse and their weight would not be felt by the glass outside. The arena’s structure is independent of the curtain. Not even the roof will put weight on the glass.

“It’s by no means cutting edge,” Loughran said while looking at the arena design on a Sprint Center Web site. “The panes of a curtain wall are not exactly assembled like Legos, but it’s similar: You snap them in, slide them down.”

The challenge, Loughran said, is in mastering the elliptical shape of this wall and its pane-by-pane design.

AWS took the challenge and presented a project bid of an agreeable $10.2 million.

How? Think “Made in China.”

Just off the boat

Having spent those long nights on the office floor mapping the design of the curtain wall, Milde and Gedney faced the prospect of handing it all over to foreign-speaking workers half a world away.

“I was concerned … about things getting lost in translation,” Milde said.

But once planners whittled down the cost of their wall, AWS was the only bidder to step up. So Kansas City overlooked its “Buy American” policy, which states that city projects should use U.S. material whenever possible.

“I can see that building from my office on Locust,” lamented Jack Carter, the president of Carter Glass Company Inc. “All this globalization malarkey…

“The promise (of the global economy) was that high-tech jobs would be flowing into our country because we had the facilities. But now it’s all going to the cheap-labor countries.”

Carter conceded that to stay competitive, “we’re looking at China, as well. We don’t want to, but you can’t get beat by $2 million on every $10 million glass project.”

Chicago architect Loughran, who wrote a book on modern glass architecture, said: “China does have brand new facilities for fabricating glass, but is that a good thing? There’s a learning curve” in all manufacturing.

The intricacy of the Sprint Center design didn’t ease worries: Numbered panes, various sizes, specific frit patterns — all had to be translated to metric and precisely executed by Chinese manufacturers Sanxin Inc., in Shenzhen, and AMC Limited in Dongguan.

“We had two companies doing two different things — one to make the glass and one to assemble our frames” around the glass, said AWS President Mike Cunningham. Representatives of his company supervised the work in China.

An AWS project manager made sure all panes were stacked and shipped to Kansas City in the order they would be installed: pane 117-A atop 118-A, and so on.

The first batch arrived last summer at a port in Long Beach, Calif. Just one rack of a dozen panes approached 6 tons. Off the boat, the racks were loaded into boxcars and shipped to a rail yard in North Kansas City, where U.S. Customs officials inspected them.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture inspector showed up at the checkpoint and, with a flashlight, combed the shipment for foreign snails and insects that might harm American crops.

After crossing the Pacific, only a few panes arrived at the work site cracked— and those were damaged on a truck bouncing on Kansas City roads.

I seal your pane

“If all these panes were the same? Boring,” project architect Milde said, walking along a concourse where the curtain was nearly complete.

Climbing steps that offer a bird’s eye view of Interstate 635, he paused at Level 5 to watch up-close the wall being built.

It works this way: Seven steel, horizontal pipes encircle the arena like a hoop skirt. Along the pipes are window anchors — 4,498 in all — each with a couple sets of nuts and bolts. A crane lifts a 700-pound pane with hooks on top to its designated spot, this one being 215-E.

A guy named Brandon in a cherry picker dabs black stuff on the anchor bolts and snaps a photograph. The pane swings into place, to be hung from the top of the pipe, where an ironworker named Mike waits.

One side of the aluminum frame is “female,” the other “male.” The edges snap into the next pane, and that pane into the next.

Four bolts hold each pane in place. Mike twists the anchor nuts with a wrench that others might use to fix a lawn mower. Done.

Elapsed time from ground to pipe to installed: 20 minutes.

“Like hanging a curtain,” said AWS supervisor Rich Griglione.

And this “curtain” will withstand rain, hail and our wicked prairie gusts?

“No doubt,” Griglione said. The panes were built to take 139 mph winds, and AWS has done the testing — once using a roaring aircraft engine pointed directly at a mock-up.

As the curtain starts to close, some concerns linger: It is not bulletproof, and the replacement cost for one broken pane is about $5,000.

Milde also is bracing for the “golden spike” moment. With glass spreading in both directions from the northwest, the two fronts will meet on the arena’s south side — all panes aligned perfectly, he hopes.

“You can’t have something standing out like a glass zipper,” he said. “Not on this building.”

He will know next month, when the final pane is hung, if China got it just right.


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Unreal... there's so much to say but just a few quick thoughts because otherwise my head will explode...

This is another example that it is just a matter of time before the Chinese go direct and cut out even more of the food chain. They (the Chinese) have to salivating at the fact that a middle of the country city like Kansas City would just blow off their "Buy American" policy for this material. Yep, keep helping them get a foothold here and the results will not be kind- just go ask the the industries in the Carolina's that have been destroyed by these actions in the past.

Plus the glass was estimated to cost 11.2 million and the low bid came in at 11.5 million!! But of course the Chinese would come in a million cheaper than that... after all the goverment subsidizes them and so on... but if the numbers are right, Kansas City threw the United States down the river for 300 grand on an 11 million dollar job? Yes it's KC's money- and they can do what they want, like offering the arena rent free to the Pittsburgh Penguins if they move there permenantly. So its ironic, on one hand they gave up the "Buy American" policy so they can save 300K (and that was without allowing any value engineering by the way) and on the other they are so flush with cash they can "give" the arena away at no charge to attract a full time tenant.

Not to mention the lack of responsibility of Kansas City and the people involved, so let me ask you, if there's a problem with this material, who will you take to task? The Chinese? Yep I am sure they'll gladly step up to the plate, just try. The Architects? The Glazier? Everyone will point at each other and back at the Chinese. And they will laugh at you.

Yes the Global economy strikes again... and every day it gets scarier and scarier.