Toki Tako

Toki Tako is a Korean barbecue-inspired taco and ssam bar located in Baltimore. Its interior is meant to transport the occupant to an urban, modern-day Seoul. To make that happen, the owners worked with designers to fill the space with pink and white color schemes inspired by Korean streetwear, including a bright pink puffer jacket. The bold, pop of pink creates a unique, eye-catching style in a space that is intimate but also cool.

Extruded aluminum profiles were used to make this unique interior design. The base ledge flange creates a recessed base at the bottom of the wall, adding a decorative flange and reveal.

In this case, bold material transitions, shadow lines, and distinctive aesthetic detail were required to achieve the vision, and the aluminum profiles helped create those elements.

One major component of this project was the use of LED lights integrated with the aluminum. The LED profiles feature LED strip lights in a protected and concealed aluminum ridge and provide the combination of warm and bright that helps give the restaurant its intimate but hip atmosphere.

Photo courtesy of PI.KL Studio

Extruded aluminum profiles were used to create bold material transitions, drop shadow lines, and provided tracks for LEDs at the base details.

3900 Adeline

Like a lot of projects that were shelved during the 2008 housing crash, the mixed-used development called 3900 Adeline in Emeryville, California, had some trouble getting restarted when it was resurrected in 2010. Located in a transitioning industrial neighborhood, the project called for an existing one-story, light-industrial building to be replaced with 101 for-rent residential and live/work units as well as 1,000 square feet of retail space—if the architects could make the budget work.

“It was right when people were emerging from the crisis, but banks were still nervous about rental properties,” says Toby Levy, FAIA, principal at Levy Design Partners, which designed the project. “Since it wasn’t a premier location, it was very scrutinized.”

So Levy had to make some tough decisions. Rather than the extensive use of metal siding she had planned, she had to go with more budget-friendly cement fiberboard. But she was still determined to maintain the clean, modern lines she originally envisioned, saying, “Once you make the decision to use mostly cement fiber, the questions are, how do you make it look a little different, and how do you do it to scale?”

Levy found answers to both questions in extruded aluminum trim. “You’re always looking for inventive ways to create interest and scale while not blowing the budget,” she says. “In this case, it did all those things.”

Part of the reason the trim worked so well was that it came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes to fit with the cement panel’s varied range of thicknesses. “We were pleased to find there were some unusual trim pieces as well as regular trim pieces that worked with it,” Levy says. “This was not a project where we could have invented our own. It had to be off the shelf.”

Levy relied most on 4-inch trim pieces. She placed those between the 2-foot-wide cement fiberboards to add interest and break up the siding. Then she used corner V trim pieces to give the edges a thoroughly modern square edge.

“You would have the trim piece anyhow and we got an extra bit of look with that same piece,” she says. “That’s the name of the game—making these inherently flat-looking cement panels have more interest.”

Getting all the trim from the same manufacturer also helped keep costs—and construction problems—low. “There’s nothing worse than getting one piece of trim from one place and another from somewhere else,” she says. “You don’t know whether they’ll take paint the same, bend the same, or work the same.”

Now that Levy knows herself how well the trim works, she plans to keep it in her architectural bag of budget tricks. “It did what it said it was supposed to do, and it performed like we expected it to perform,” she says. “It gave more scale. It gave more interest. And it was a very inexpensive way to do it.”

In an ideal world, the manufacturer of water management systems and/or architecturally interesting trim and reveal pieces will have the staff and resources available to help design the building envelope for ultimate form and function. When a manufacturer has thousands of design and color options, this allows architects and users to dramatically improve their building aesthetics and create modern architectural lines preferred by millennials and others in today’s market. But without knowledgeable assistance, specifying the best products or combination of products can be a daunting task.

A manufacturer may have its own team of architects in-house to aid and assist the process of selecting and assuring the correct profile for the specific application or desired aesthetic effect. Depending on the size and flexibility of the manufacturer, it may also have the ability and materials to provide appropriate non-extruded fabrication from sheet stock of almost any shape or profile that may be needed on a project.

For best results, an architect should rely heavily on the knowledge and expertise of the manufacturer chosen for the project.

Photo courtesy of Levy Design Partners

3900 Adeline, a mixed-use development in Emeryville, Calif., used extruded aluminum to create clean, modern lines and interesting details while not exceeding its budget.

Photo courtesy of Levy Design Partners

In the case of 3900 Adeline, the manufacturer and architect worked together to find the ideal design and color options, working in collaboration from the beginning to optimize the building’s form and function.

AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT FIRE-RATED PROFILE TESTING

A fire-rated profile must undergo a fire performance evaluation in accordance with ASTM E119 using standard methods for building construction materials. In one example of the latest fire-rated aluminum technology, a symmetric non-load bearing wall assembly with protective joint reveal was put under intense fire and hosestream testing for 120 minutes.

The set-up
A 10x10’ assembly was constructed consisting of a steel frame, two layers of gypsum on each side of the assembly, and an aluminum protective reveal layer in both horizontal and vertical directions. The assembly was framed 16” on center with 3 5/8-deep steel studs, each ¾” short of 10’ with a corresponding top and bottom track, fastened together at the corners with ½” pan-head screws (floating stud 3/8” on top and bottom) and a double stud with a ½” gap between the two were placed at the center of the assembly.
Unfaced fiberglass insulation batts (3 ½”) were placed within each stud cavity. Insulation was also placed within the ½” gap between the two center studs.
Two layers of 5/8” Type X gypsum was applied horizontally to each side of the steel frame with a 11/16” gap at the horizontal and vertical centers of the assembly. Gypsum panels were shipped as face layers. Sections were symmetric from unexposed to exposed sides. The base layer gypsum was fastened with 1 1/8” Type S screws with 8” on center spacing on edge and 12” in the field. Fasteners were set back 1” along the board long edge and ¾” along the board cut edge.
The joints and fastener heads were coated with 2 layers of joint compound, including 2” tape over the joints and reveal edges.
An aluminum drywall reveal molding (5/8” wide, 5/8” deep, 7/8” flanges) was placed within the 11/16” groove left in two layers of gypsum in both the horizontal and vertical directions. A 5/8” strip of factory-applied intumescent tape was affixed to the back width (toward the stud cavity) of the molding along the full 10’ both horizontally and vertically, which provides the thermal protection to the interior of the wall assembly.
When exposed to elevated heat, the intumescent expands out from the drywall reveal molding, forming an insulating barrier. The center recessed section of the vertical reveal was notched out to form a cross in the horizontal and vertical reveals, which was sealed with firestop. The reveals were fastened to the gypsum with 2 ¼” Type S screws with 12” on center spacing.
To obtain representative thermal information of the sample during the test, the fire endurance assembly was instrumented with sample thermocouples (TCs). The TCs were placed in one overall group.
The unexposed TCs were placed at center and quarter points of assembly as well as at additional points throughout the assembly. Five were placed directly behind the aluminum reveal. All unexposed TCs were covered with 6” ceramic pads.

Testing and results
The assembly was fixed in place within the sample holder and insulated on the perimeter edges with ceramic wool insulation. The furnace temperature, sample temperatures, and furnace pressure were continuously monitored at 1 Hz until test termination. Also, horizontal deflection was measured every 5 minutes during the test.

Furnace: a large-scale vertical exposure E119 furnace.

Laboratory conditions: 14° C, 62 degrees RH

Four min and 15 sec: cracking joint compound
12 min: bowed aluminum reveal
28 min: melting of aluminum reveal
1 hour 4 min: fallen sections of reveal on face – some separation of TCs pad due to bowing wall
1 hour 52 min: no significant change
2 hours 2 mins 33 sec: Furnace off – time-temp area achieved
2 hours 4 min: start hose-stream
2 hours, 6 min, 30 sec: stop hose-stream – slight trickling of water down assembly, but no projection of water (blowout of gypsum or reveal) through assembly.

The furnace test was terminated at 120 min, 33 seconds once the area under the time-temperature curve was met. No flames passed through the assembly at that time, giving a wall rating of 120 minutes rounded to the nearest integral minute. And so, this fulfilled the requirement of flames or gases hot enough to ignite cotton waste for the 120-minute period. The temperature profiles for this sample are grouped unexposed TCS as shown in Figure 7 as well as the revealonly TCS. The average and single-point unexposed temperature thresholds (139°C + ambient and 181°C + ambient) were not surpassed during the test, giving the assembly rating of 120 minutes, rounding to the nearest integral minute. The average temperature at the end of the test was 61°C. Therefore, this assembly passed the heat transmission requirement for the 120-min duration. The reveal temperatures were approximately the same as the rest of the gypsum temperatures.
Following the 2-hour furnace exposure, the assembly was backed away from the furnace to perform the hose stream portion. For this portion, a water hose stream was applied at a pressure of 30 psi for 2½ minutes (2½ min./100 ft2 for 120-min. resistance, ASTM E2226, Standard Practice for Application of Hose Stream). Hose stream application began approximately 3 minutes following removal from the furnace.
No holes or penetrations developed in the assembly that permitted the projection of water from the hose stream beyond the unexposed surface, fulfilling this hose-stream requirement of the standard. Some water had trickled down from the center of the reveal, but no water projection or blowout of the gypsum or reveal occurred.
In conclusion, the symmetric non-load-bearing wall assembly with aluminum reveal as detailed above passed all requirements for the 120-minute fire endurance test, according to ASTM E119, Standard Test Methods for Fire Tests of Building Construction and Materials. The wall assembly did not have gases hot enough to ignite cotton material for the test. The average (139°C + ambient) or single-point (181°C + ambient) temperature thresholds were not surpassed. In addition, this same assembly was subjected to a hose-stream for 2½ minutes, and it did not develop an opening that permitted the projection of water from the hose stream beyond the unexposed surface. In the end, the assembly was certified for a 120-minute duration.