Cable Railing in NY Museum of Art and Design | Jakob

The 4,500 square foot Museum by Edward Durrel hosts 500,000 visitors every year. To create the perfect flow of foot traffic between the lobby and the Museum entrance, a transparent, stair was conceived that was to almost float in the air. The stairway by Allied Works Architecture was a piece of art in of itself, using railing solutions made of Stainless Steel Architectural Ropes from Jakob Rope Systems.

The stair extends from the cellar floor to the second-floor gallery ceiling, it is suspended on 300 6mm 1×19 stranded wire cables tensioned to approximately 900 pounds. Each of the woven stainless-steel stringers, which list a minimum breaking strength of 22.0 kN, measures ¼ inch in diameter. Spacing is 2½ inches on center to also function as a balustrade.

The stair is composed of four main sections with two separate landing sections. Four cables penetrate each tread, to provide vertical alignment, each cable is single-span. The architect described the project as one of his most difficult jobs, particularly because of the intricacy involved in welding each plate to each other and accurately drilling the multitude of holes for the cable spacing.

Jakob offers a wide range of wire ropes, end terminations and accessories and they can offer solutions to almost every architectural challenge. For this project, Jakob designed special hardware to fulfill the requirements and specifications:

Jakob stainless steel cables are precision manufactured from marine grade stainless steel, which gives them durability and a timeless look. Wire ropes can absorb tensile forces extremely well, are easy to handle and cost-efficient. They require almost no maintenance and keep their look for a long time. This makes them also ideally suited for decorative uses.

The steel cables have a myriad of architectural applications, such as railing ropes, rope structures, artwork, facade greening cable suspensions and balustrade infills.