Facade Fix or Repair: One Board's Decision Journey

What approach works best with façade issues: Band-Aid repairs or full-blown replacement? Depends on each building, and 245 West 99th St, a 34-story condominium, faced this issue when inspection of 17,000 rainscreen tiles revealed cracks that could cause tiles to fall, water leaks or other failures. Eric Vonderhyde, a principal at Bertolini Architectural Works, shares what the condo board considered when faced with repair or replacement options. Habitat’s Paula Chin conducts the interview.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!

Transcript

Paula Chin: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York co-op and condo board directors. I'm Paula Chin of Habitat Magazine, and with me today is Eric Vonderhyde, a principal at Bertolini Architectural Works. 

A rain screen is like a building's raincoat. It's there to withstand the elements, but it can break down over time.

Eric, you worked with an Upper West Side building where the rain screen, which was terracotta, parts were actually falling off. Can you tell us what happened there? 

Eric Vonderhyde: Yeah, sure. So the building's at 245 West 99th Street. It's a 34 story condominium on the corner of Broadway and 99th Street. And in 2015, they actually had a tile fall from one of the upper floors down onto a lower terrace.

When we first got the call we obviously didn't know the extent of the problem-- if this was just some sort of localized issue. So we embarked on an investigation phase where we started doing larger scale inspections. During that time we noted that there are over 17,000 tiles in that particular building.

And about midway through our inspections, we also noticed that we were seeing a large number of failures, some larger but a lot of micro cracks. Things that eventually would lead to full failures and falling tiles. We conferred with the board and discussed a program of additional inspections and testing. We really wanted to find out what was going on, whether this was a material failure or it was something that had to do with the installation or transportation of the materials. 

Paula Chin: Eric, describe for me what the rain screen was and what it looked like and where it was on the building. I presume it couldn't cover the whole thing, being such a skyscraper. 

Eric Vonderhyde: Sure. Yeah. We're seeing more and more rain screen in New York. Generally it covers the structural areas, which we call spandrels. So it's a glass curtain wall. The apartments have floor to ceiling glass, but between the floors they have this rain screen tile. And there are variations on the number of tiles. There's a 12 tile pattern and a 16 tile pattern. And basically because it's a screen, it does let some moisture through. It's open, it allows the building to cool. It sits in front of all the insulation and the interior walls of the building.

So it was these elements on the outside that we were finding were cracking. 

Paula Chin: I'm actually familiar with this building and know that it's a newer one. I'm surprised that terracotta was used. Is that a common thing? 

Eric Vonderhyde: So they do have proprietary rain screen systems. This particular system is from Germany.

It seems when we were doing our research that they use it in a more low rise fashion. Most of the examples we could see in Europe were three four story car dealerships, malls. I won't say it was a misuse of the material but it certainly hadn't been used in this way before that we could find.

So height may have played an issue with these failures. 

Paula Chin: So what did you find when you did your sort of extensive examination? And did you do this in say, like every X number of feet and then extrapolated from that? How did you know the extent of the problem? 

Eric Vonderhyde: It was interesting in that we had come to a time where if there was a problem with the tile manufacturing, there was still a very small window where the building could have gone after the developer, the original sponsor. So there was an attorney involved. There was also the insurance company involved and our firm, BAW, we partnered with a testing company in Westchester called Highbridge.

And we mapped out a series of material tests. And while we were doing that, we inspected a hundred percent of the building and identified every location that we could see with the naked eye that had a failure. And we also did sample testing on tiles that didn't have failures. And we ran it through every test imaginable.

It took almost a year to get all of the testing done, particularly freeze thaw testing. You have to run it through cycles, so it takes a lot of time. And surprisingly, we found no material defects whatsoever. In fact, the tiles were very well made. They were dense. There were no internal flaws under a microscope.

So we speculated, we hypothesized, that this may have been installation issue or a shipping issue. Maybe some of these cracks, they were vibrated, I don't know, somebody hit a pothole on the LIE while they were transporting the panels from Long Island to the site. So we didn't find a, a material problem.

Paula Chin: How extensive was the cracking, and you mentioned a chunk that had actually fallen off. Was a lot of the terracotta in danger of doing that? 

Eric Vonderhyde: So we found a number of locations, I'm going to say maybe about 10 locations, where the terracotta was really hanging by a thread. What we really found was a lot of hairline cracks and small micro cracks, which in time, given the climate in New York definitely would've turned into full fledged cracks and more falling tiles.

So we removed all of the tiles that we found with cracks. So the building was safe when we completed our investigation. And we conferred with the board of directors at the building and said, listen, if this was an issue with installation, or an issue with transportation, what we should see when we do follow up inspections is no new cracks growing. So we set up a program where we were gonna do annual inspections, and if we got to a point where we continued to find new cracking we were really gonna need to consider replacing this material. Whether or not we could find a smoking gun or not.

Paula Chin: That's a huge project. What options were there and what did they choose? 

Eric Vonderhyde: We went through the program of additional inspections. We went through two years and we continued to find cracks. We ran a budget analysis of what it would mean to continue inspecting on an annual basis, continue removing tiles.

It's a big building. It takes weeks to complete all our inspections and pull all these things down and put the scaffolds in and things of that nature, really adds up. So we ran budget side by side of what the cost would be to replace them altogether with a different material that doesn't fail versus continuing to try and maintain it.

And in about a 10 year timeline, it was a break even point, and I remember it because it was the eve of the pandemic. It was February 2020. It was the last in-person meeting that I ever had with the board for almost two years. And basically, they made the decision that we should look at doing the full replacement.

Paula Chin: And again, what were the options and what did they go with? 

Eric Vonderhyde: We looked at a number of different options. The challenge here was we have a proprietary wall with a proprietary system, and we needed to retrofit with something else. We looked primarily at aluminum and we looked at glass. There were some really nice glass options, but they were prohibitively expensive.

And ultimately we ended up going with aluminum. We ended up partnering with Garland. They're a roofing and panel company. They'd been around for 125 years and their engineering team was really great in helping us resolve how to take these new panels and retrofit them into that existing system.

Paula Chin: What does that mean when you say the existing screen or structure was proprietary and how did that affect what you could go with, in terms of the aluminum? 

Eric Vonderhyde: The facade was designed to support these tiles. It's got a substructure behind it, had these clips and we really wanted to reuse as much as the system as we could, 'cause each component costs money.

In fact, a couple of the people that we spoke with really wanted to abandon everything and start from scratch. And we ruled those vendors out because of the added cost of really creating a new structure behind. So we have these aluminum bars that are behind the rain screen and once again with the engineering team at Garland, we were able to come up with a system that allowed us to put in these new rain screen panels that meets the criteria for rain screen. It still needs to breathe, it still needs to do all the things that the tile was doing, and allowed us to do some pretty. Nice designs, present different options to the building for them to select from. 

Paula Chin: So unlike the original rain screen, which was tiles, which I imagine were smaller, you could put up panels.

Can you give me an idea of the relative sizes?

Eric Vonderhyde: Sure. So like I said, we had bays of 12 or 16 tiles. The tiles are probably about 12 inches long by about eight or 10 inches high. They're very heavy which was helpful. That means the structure behind was really robust. The aluminum weighs far less; really the only load on them would be wind.

And we did these depending on the locations, in either single panels or side by side panels. The new panels are the full height of this bay, by either the full width or we have a panel break, and then another one start up to three in a row. We went with a fairly simple design of three protruding panels standing out, and we kept the same color palette as the original designs.

We looked at some options, but we felt along with the board that staying with the original palette would be easier to approve on a building wide level. Sometimes when you introduce new design elements, you get some backlash. 

Paula Chin: And what was that palette? 

Eric Vonderhyde: They have a red color, a tan color, and a dark bronze color. We ended up going with more of a charcoal in the tile. But this is a dark bronze. And I was at the building last week and honestly I could identify it when I look at it, but when you just walk by the building, it really feels the way it was before we made this change. 

Paula Chin: I imagine it was a very big project installing this. How was that done from top to bottom and how long did it take? 

Eric Vonderhyde: We're actually still in the process of doing the replacements. We started last fall and we're about 70% done right now. You are correct, we're starting at the top. I think we have five or six scaffolds and we go down each bay. What happens is, it's a lot of panels to be fabricated, so they're delivering these in batches. The contractor, Upgrade Contracting, is doing one scaffold, drop the full width of that drop from top to bottom, and then we move to the next location, top to bottom, top to bottom. 

Paula Chin: Ballpark, how much did this cost? 

Eric Vonderhyde: We are at about $3 million now, and that excludes all of the previous testing that we did and additional inspections. Just the replacement portion of this is about $3 million. 

Paula Chin: Quite a price tag. Eric, what would you say the takeaway is for other buildings?

Eric Vonderhyde: There's two things that I was thinking of. This started in 2015. We looked at budgets in 2020, and because these things, because it was the entire building, it takes a really long time from start to finish to get there. And those budgets increased. The pandemic certainly played a role in how much this particular project increased: the cost of aluminum and things went up. But really our original budgets, to the point where we got to it, were pretty low in comparison to what the actual event was.

So I think when you're planning for these things, definitely take in to account the timeframe that it's gonna be done in, and account for increases in cost in both labor material and insurance in the New York market. And then the other one is you need to understand that, you need to pull the trigger at some point and make the right choice.

I do deal with a good number of buildings who are hoping to continue repairing. I'm hesitant to say bandaid, but we do get people who want to, let's just keep doing these minor repairs and seeing where we're gonna go. And given the laws in New York now the amount of oversight that the Department of Buildings has, you're better off, if you can afford it, to undertake a larger scale project now than deferring the maintenance, deferring the maintenance. The costs are just gonna go up and who knows what new laws are gonna come up in the interim. 

Paula Chin: A final question, Eric. In terms of the options that boards might have, do you recommend aluminum or is it only good for certain kinds of buildings?

Eric Vonderhyde: Really depends. I would say if you're dealing with rain screen you don't want to use a material that can fail catastrophically. We do a lot of landmarks work, so we like terracotta, we know how to use it. But in this particular case when terracotta has a failure, big chunks of the material fall off. You're far better off using something that can't fail in that way.

The maintenance factor and it removes the risk factor as well. But if you're dealing with a traditional facade where you have limestone or terracotta, you're gonna need to go back with those original materials. You just need to design 'em in such a way that hopefully their life is longer than the original installation.

Paula Chin: Eric, this has been a really interesting story. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Eric Vonderhyde: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.