Blue Owl Stair

New York, NY

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The signature staircase for Blue Owl Capital Group is located in their Park Avenue office in Midtown, Manhattan. The shape of the stair was designed by the architecture firm, Gensler, to spiral into space with no apparent means of intermediate support while maintaining a visual lightness. CRAFT’s proposed stair structure was a radical departure from conventional norms. Together with the fabricator, Caliper Studio, CRAFT imagined a tubular steel form as a rigid spring made of purely flat plates. This maximized the stiffness of the stair’s cross section while minimizing the complexities of fabrication associated with traditional processes of bending plates.

The resulting structure functions as a skeletal spine wrapping around a cylinder of taut cables stretching from floor to ceiling above. The introduction of the plate concept allowed for the fine tuning of the form to a relative minimum necessary to accomplish its performative requirements. It also created an efficient methodology for production as the stair is easily segmented into components necessary to accommodate transportation and installation constraints.

CRAFT employed a parametric model and computational tools to iterate through an evolution of form and discretization of panels to evolve the design of the stair. Cross sections of the structural volume were optimized in this way to reduce the visual weight of the stair as well as the quantity of materials.

The finishes of the stairs also represent a departure from convention. The doubly curved underside finished form of the stair was created using molded fiberglass panels created in association with New England Boatworks in Rhode Island. The use of fiberglass panels significantly reduced the amount of site time necessary to create the finished form as compared to traditional methods using plaster.