DETAILS

The stone cladding at the base of 15 Hudson Yards that wraps the tower base and extends along the High Line presented a geometry problem with no conventional solution where no two panels were the same. The façade was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of the principal design firms on the Hudson Yards development, where a key member of the façade design team, Neil Thelen, played an instrumental role in shaping the stone system. Having established his own practice, Thelen Design Group, the fabrication scope was undertaken directly with Neil and his team, the challenge being to translate a continuous, irregular surface into a system of individually engineered stone panels that could be fabricated and installed.

The approach was to implement parametric automation. Rather than manually resolving each panel, the team developed template-driven workflows that took the input geometry and instantiated engineered panel definitions automatically, capturing dimensional variation, panel to panel relationships, and fabrication constraints across the entire system. The same methodology extended to the structural backup steel. Coordinating work alongside the structural engineers and steel fabricators, the team used similar parametric workflows to design the steel framing and anchor systems that carry each panel, ensuring the structural system responded to the geometry rather than forcing the geometry to conform to a standard structural solution.

This work, which included fabrication models, shop tickets, and setout drawings was executed in CATIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, with Rhino and Grasshopper used for upstream geometry development and design iteration. The result was a fully resolved system at a scale and complexity that manual methods couldn't have achieved within the project's schedule.

Note: This project was completed prior to the founding of Galbraith Design Studio, during Chris Galbraith's tenure as project designer at Thelen Design Group