Enclos designed and installed the first-ever cable net glass wall in the United States at the lobby area of One North Wacker in downtown Chicago. The cable net strategy developed effectively minimized the sightlines of the steel support structure supporting the glass, allowing architect Goettsch Partners to achieve maximum transparency with a series of 40´ glass facades that wrap the perimeter of the lobby space in over 16,000 square feet of glass.
Stainless steel cables were pretensioned vertically and horizontally to form a grid corresponding to the glass module to tensions greater than 150 psf. Custom designed disc-shaped fasteners at the vertex points act to clamp the glass to the net formed by cables, allowing the cable net to support a flat-glass-membrane spanning 40´ vertically. The glass lites are point-supported via the clamping mechanism at the corners, fixing the intersecting cables of the net with a four-part stainless steel casting. To ensure the highest transparency possible, monolithic glass panes incorporate an anti-reflective coating to significantly reduce the reflections from the glass surface, resulting in an extremely low surface area reflectivity of 1% (typical glass surfaces average 7%).