Evershine Residence
Los Altos Hills, CA
This project involved the structural engineering design of a natural stone façade and its anchorage to the structural steel framework of this new, two-story residence. The selected stone was Saint Maximin, a tertiary French limestone. By desire of the project’s owner, the structure and its enclosure was required to meet all of the Building Code requirements for an Essential Facility such as would be required of a hospital or fire station.
This meant that the stone façade must be capable of absorbing all inter-story drifts due to seismic excitations without any undue effects. The intent of the exterior wall design was to support the stone on a monolithic substrate wall. Due to the building being rather flexible, it was necessary to detach these stiff walls from the building drifts at the second floor and roof levels. It was also necessary to isolate the interior and exterior corners to alleviate undue stress on the corner quoin stones. These corner stones were supported independently from the rest of the wall stones, on a single tube steel column. Johnson Leifield developed a Universal-Movement Connector for these columns that enabled these quoin stones to achieve 2% maximum lateral movements, in any direction, due to the articulation of the stacked stones. Conflicts with the adjacent wall stones was alleviated by rebating the back of the quoin stones to create an unrestricted “slip” joint.
This meant that the stone façade must be capable of absorbing all inter-story drifts due to seismic excitations without any undue effects. The intent of the exterior wall design was to support the stone on a monolithic substrate wall. Due to the building being rather flexible, it was necessary to detach these stiff walls from the building drifts at the second floor and roof levels. It was also necessary to isolate the interior and exterior corners to alleviate undue stress on the corner quoin stones. These corner stones were supported independently from the rest of the wall stones, on a single tube steel column. Johnson Leifield developed a Universal-Movement Connector for these columns that enabled these quoin stones to achieve 2% maximum lateral movements, in any direction, due to the articulation of the stacked stones. Conflicts with the adjacent wall stones was alleviated by rebating the back of the quoin stones to create an unrestricted “slip” joint.
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