Saint Louis University’s Grand Hall is a seven-story, 237,000-square-feet facility located in the heart of campus and overlooking the cityscape. The $71 million project houses nearly 530 students and provides collaborative learning and lounge spaces. In addition to housing, Grand Hall features a dining hall with restaurant-style seating and an outdoor courtyard. The building façade features a varied-width glass panel design. To reflect the university’s brand colors, the exterior contains high-performing insulating vision glass in both tinted and laminated blue coatings and tinted spandrel glass installed into aluminum curtainwall and window wall framing.
The glass and systems:
In all, 35,000 square feet of glass panels allow for an abundance of natural light. The project required spandrel glass to harmonize with the vision areas of the building.
IWR North America installed glass panels supplied by Viracon. The panels are made up of 1-inch VUE1-40 Insulating Glass (vision), 1-inch VUE1-40 Spandrel Insulating Glass (Non-vision) and 1-1/16-inch Clear VE1-2M Blue Laminated Insulating Glass (Vision deep blue tinted glass).
Kawneer supplied metal systems, including FG501T window wall framing, 1600 System 1 deep curtainwall, Trifab VG451T storefront framing and 500 series heavy wall-wide style doors.
Additionally, IWR installed glass guardrails and ornamental metal handrails fabricated by Modern Metals.
Inside, IWR installed mirrors in student rooms, specialty glass partitions in the cafeteria with custom fleurs-de-lis symbolizing the university’s heritage, fire-rated glass at student study rooms and more than 30 aluminum entrance doors on the exterior and interior of the building.