To support a beautiful façade design with unique angles and breaks in the glass for the University of Chicago’s Lab School, a highly customized shading solution was required. Draper rose to the challenge, designing a motorized shade system on tracks with re-directional rollers to help the shades follow the changes in slope. “With the changing break-line in the curtainwall glass per shade, each shade was slightly different with different length tracks, different length brackets and different numbers of brackets,” reports Draper’s director of engineering Harold Seib. “Another issue was bending the side channels/tracks. We used 3D engineering rapid prototyping machines, and developed a process using printed plastic inserts that allowed us to use a gym equipment tubing bender to bend u-channel.”
