Inside Third & Bond: Week 106

This week the Third & Bond bloggers describe why they have it made in the shade. Click on any of the photos to expand.

Doo-hickey. Thing-a-ma-jig. Brise soleil. Funny names we’ve used to describe the sun shading architectural element gracing the private roof terraces at Third + Bond. Brise soleil is the technical term, an adopted French term literally meaning sun breaker. A brise soleil is a type of structural sunshade, often with vertical or horizontal slats or holes that keep sunlight from fully striking a building.

The angle of the slats on the brise soleil is determined by the angle of the sun during the hottest time when the building needs to be shaded (and beauty). Some brise soleils have louvered slats that move either during the course of the day or seasonally (i.e., the sun’s angle is lower in winter).

Our brise soleil is composed of cedar for the slats and the aluminum panel of the façade. It has two functions: beauty and shading. We think…

…it is a thing of beauty, but as beauty is subjective, no doubt we’ll get disagreement from some of you. Let’s move on to the shade component. Since the terraces are completely unobstructed by any neighbors and south-facing, they get a tremendous amount of light. (Views are awesome, too.) The bit of shade provided by the brise soleil is welcome though it never covers the entirety of the terrace.

A few weeks ago, a group of architects, engineers, and green building aficionados toured Third + Bond as part of an event planned by GreenHomeNYC [www.greenhomenyc.org]. During the course of the tour, we talked about every aspect of Third + Bond’s impending LEED-Gold and Energy Star statuses. We’ve talked on this topic a few times without ever being questioned on sun shading until this tour. Fortunately we were standing near the brise soleil at the time or would have been at a loss for words.

Still not sure that you have a mental picture of the uses of a brise soleil? The New York Times building has a brise soleil made up of ceramic rods. Alain Robert, the French spiderman, deftly weaved his way through them when climbing the building last June. Two other climbers subsequently tried to climb the building. We harbor no concerns about spiders, men, or French spidermen climbing our brise soleils. These doo hickeys don’t present the same kind of awe-inspiring, death-defying channel. Our thinga-ma-jigs are more likely to inspire sipping hot apple cider while drumming up a Halloween costume perhaps professional building climber?

If you dress as Alain Robert, please come show off your costume at Third + Bond on Halloween we’ll be passing out candy in the late afternoon.

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-105 [Brownstoner]
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