Located in St. Louis Missouri, the 37 story apartment complex overlooks Forest Park. The 540,000 square foot building has a structure of a post-tensioned concrete frame, with the exterior non-bearing CFS framing infill between the slab.

The exterior walls consist of tilted exterior CFS wall panels, with the cold-formed steel framing itself tilting outward at approximately 9 degrees. The tilting walls required that a portion of self-weight be applied in the windward direction of the stud. At the inside corners, the walls radiused around the slab as well as tilted out. Because of the building’s height and difficulty reaching exterior connections, all attachments were designed so that they could be installed from the interior of the building.

This building is in a high seismic zone and was expecting to experience seismic drift between floors. To accommodate this, the walls were engineered to show they could tilt in and out, as well as show that the sheathing was flexible enough to accommodate the required in-plane movement. This prevented the need to have costly drift clips installed to allow for movement. The wall framing ended up being more flexible than the exterior cladding, ultimately requiring that the cladding be designed to drift in front of the metal stud wall to prevent damage to the finish, requiring coordination of load transfer from the cladding the metal studs.