Nike House of Innovation
Nike House of Innovation 000 is the brand's six-storey, 68,000 square foot flagship at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan, wrapped in a curtain wall of carved and slumped glass that makes a static building read as a runner in motion.
Project Overview
The store opened in November 2018 as a recladding of the Fifth Avenue elevation of the former Pahlavi Foundation Building. It was designed by Nike Global Retail Design with CallisonRTKL, with facade engineering by Heintges Consulting Architects and Engineers and computational design support from Mode Lab. The glass was fabricated by Cricursa in Barcelona and unitised and installed by seele GmbH from its facility in Augsburg, Germany.
The Facade Concept
Nike senior creative director Andy Thaemert described the ambition as static architecture that feels like it is in motion. The facade delivers that through two operations applied to the same double-glazed, low-emissivity units: the glass is slumped into a shallow three-dimensional curve, and its surface is carved with fine striations set at 23.5 degrees, an angle taken from the Swoosh. The curvature produces constantly shifting reflections of the surrounding buildings as a pedestrian moves along the avenue, while the striations catch light as a directional grain. Neither effect depends on graphics, signage or applied colour; the movement is a property of the glass itself.
Fabrication
Standard modules measure roughly eight by fourteen feet, with full-size test samples recorded at 2,350 millimetres wide by 4,090 millimetres high, and around one hundred units were shipped in total. The tapered geometry at the entrance is resolved with three trapezoidal variations plus a single triangular panel.
Each panel was heated to approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, slumped into a custom mould and then annealed. Carving was carried out by high-speed CNC milling with the panel flat in a polishing station: roughly 115 linear metres of carved line per panel, cut with 20 millimetre millstones at a 168 degree included angle to a depth of 1.05 millimetres. Breakage risk was present throughout, since every operation was performed on finished architectural glass.
Cricursa's central contribution to buildability was to regularise the modules to a single rectangular size, so that only three additional custom moulds were needed for the irregular entrance shapes. Slump moulds consume space, material and lead time, and reducing the mould count is what allowed a facade of this complexity to be produced to a retail programme.
Testing
Heintges verified five full-size samples under ultimate load conditions, covering differential thermal loading, wind pressure loading and structural loading to an effective safety factor of four times the design load. Carving a groove into the outer lite of an insulating glass unit removes material from the surface that carries tensile stress, so independent physical proof, rather than analysis alone, was the only acceptable basis for approval.
Rhino and Grasshopper were used to generate the design geometry and the drawings issued for glass manufacture.
Key Facts
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Business Impact
- ~100 glass units from 4 mould types
- Tested to 4x design load
- 68,000 sq ft Fifth Avenue flagship
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Tools Used in the Case Study
Discover which tools and technologies were used for "Nike House of Innovation".
Rhino 3D
Rhino 3D is a professional 3D modeling software used by architects, designers, engineers, and digital fabrication specialists to create accurate freeform geometry and complex parametric designs. Powered by precise NURBS modeling and an extensive plugin ecosystem, Rhino supports everything from conceptual design and architectural modeling to product development and computational design. Whether you’re comparing Rhino 3D pricing, exploring its features, evaluating the free trial, or looking for the best Rhino 3D alternatives, this guide explains everything you need to know to determine whether Rhino 3D software is the right choice for your workflow.
Grasshopper
Grasshopper 3D is the visual programming environment included with Rhino for computational and parametric design. Architects, engineers, façade specialists, and fabricators connect components on a canvas to generate geometry, process data, and test design variables without building every option manually. It works directly with Rhino’s modeling environment and can extend into BIM, analysis, optimization, and fabrication workflows through official integrations, scripting, and plugins.
User Experience
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Why this tool/tech was selected
Why Rhino and Grasshopper for a Facade Like This
The Nike facade is a geometry problem before it is anything else, and it sits at the point where architectural intent has to become fabrication data. Rhino, with Grasshopper as its visual programming environment, is the standard toolset for exactly that handover, which is why the project team included Mode Lab, a computational design practice, alongside the architect and the facade engineer.
Free-form surfaces that BIM tools handle badly
A slumped glass panel is a doubly curved surface with a shallow, continuously varying rise. Building modelling tools are organised around planar, parametric building elements and describe this kind of geometry awkwardly. Rhino's NURBS core represents it natively, at the accuracy a glass fabricator needs rather than at the accuracy a general arrangement drawing needs.
Rules, not drawings
The striation pattern is not a drawn artefact. It is a rule: lines at 23.5 degrees, at a controlled spacing, at a defined depth and cutter geometry, mapped onto a curved surface across roughly a hundred panels. Encoding that as a Grasshopper definition means the pattern can be adjusted globally, and every panel regenerates consistently. Drawing 115 linear metres of carved line per panel by hand, a hundred times over, is not a realistic proposition.
Output aimed at the machine
The carving was executed by high-speed CNC milling and the curvature by slumping into moulds. Both need geometry the shop can drive tooling from. A parametric model that produces mould profiles, panel outlines and cut paths from the same definition removes the translation step where discrepancies normally appear between the architect's intent and the fabricator's setout.
Fast iteration against a fixed constraint
Cricursa's requirement to converge on one rectangular module, with only three extra moulds for the entrance, is a hard constraint that had to be reconciled with a facade meant to look continuously varied. Testing panelisation options against that constraint is quick in a parametric model and slow in any other medium.
Challenges the Client Faced before
Making a fixed building look like it is moving
The brief called for architecture that reads as motion while standing still, on a flagship elevation that also had to work as a retail shopfront. The effect had to come from the building fabric rather than from applied graphics or lighting, which pushed the entire problem into the glass.
Two difficult operations on the same panel
Slumping and deep surface carving are each demanding on their own. Combining them on a double-glazed, low-emissivity insulating unit compounds the risk, because carving removes material from a surface that carries tensile stress and slumping introduces its own residual stresses. Breakage risk ran through the whole sequence.
Mould economics
Unique slump moulds are expensive in space, material and lead time. A facade of a hundred visibly varied panels could easily have required a hundred moulds, which would have made the design unbuildable on a retail schedule.
A retail programme
Flagship stores open to commercial deadlines that do not move for facade development. The design, testing and fabrication sequence had to compress into a timeframe set by the opening date rather than by the difficulty of the envelope.
Recladding an existing building
This is a new elevation on an existing Fifth Avenue structure, so the curtain wall had to work with existing floor levels and structure rather than a frame designed around it.
The previous method used
The conventional route for a bespoke facade of this kind would be a set of manually drafted panel drawings, with curvature described through section profiles and the surface pattern documented as a typical detail plus a schedule of variations. The fabricator then rebuilds the geometry in their own system from those drawings.
That rebuild is where facade projects lose time and accuracy. Every reinterpretation is an opportunity for divergence, and on carved and slumped glass the tolerances are unforgiving because the operations are performed on a finished, brittle product with no scope for adjustment on site.
Neither Nike, CallisonRTKL nor Heintges has published an account of the workflow they replaced, so this describes standard facade practice rather than a documented prior process on this project.
Time / Money saved & the Business Impact.
No cost or programme figures have been published for this facade, and none are claimed here. The verifiable outcomes are technical and commercial, and on a flagship of this kind they matter more than a cost per square metre would.
A hundred panels from four mould types
The most consequential result is the rationalisation. By regularising the modules to a single rectangular size and adding only three custom moulds for the irregular entrance geometry, the team produced around one hundred units from a very small family of tools. The visual variety that the facade reads as is delivered by curvature and carving on a repeated module rather than by making each panel unique, which is what brought the design inside a retail budget and schedule.
Verified structural performance
Five full-size samples were tested by Heintges under differential thermal loading, wind pressure loading and structural loading to an effective safety factor of four times the design load. For an assembly that deliberately removes material from the glass surface, that testing is the deliverable that made the design approvable, and it converts a novel detail into a documented, insurable one.
A facade that works as brand media
The commercial return on a Fifth Avenue flagship is measured in attention. A curtain wall whose reflections change as pedestrians pass produces that continuously, without signage, screens or running costs, and it cannot be copied by a competitor without repeating the same fabrication effort.
An extended supply chain held together by geometry
Design in Portland and Seattle, engineering in New York, glass in Barcelona, unitisation in Augsburg and installation in Manhattan. A single parametric geometry definition shared across those parties is what kept a facade of this tolerance coordinated across four countries.
Customer Quote
Andy Thaemert, Senior Creative Director, Nike: the aim was to create static architecture that feels like it is in motion.
Original Case Study
Additional Information
Project credits
Project: Nike House of Innovation 000. Location: Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street, New York City, United States. Size: 68,000 square feet over six storeys. Opened: November 2018. Architects: Nike Global Retail Design with CallisonRTKL. Facade consultants: Heintges Consulting Architects and Engineers, with Mode Lab. Glass fabrication: Cricursa, Barcelona. Unitisation and installation: seele GmbH, Augsburg. System: double-glazed curtain wall with low-emissivity coating, carved and slumped insulating glass units.
Key facade figures
Standard module approximately 8 by 14 feet, with full-size samples at 2,350 by 4,090 millimetres. Around 100 units shipped. Entrance resolved with three trapezoidal variations and one triangular panel. Approximately 115 linear metres of carved line per panel, cut with 20 millimetre millstones at a 168 degree angle to 1.05 millimetres depth. Striations set at 23.5 degrees. Slumping at approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit followed by annealing.
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