Miscellaneous

The American Plaza Towers Complex in Southwest Portland with an indoor swimming facility built in the 1960’s that incorporated the use of natural light.

All the glass in these picture windows had failed and the windows on one side of the bump-up had begun to leak at some point in time, rotting the wall beneath.

This, and the fact that washing these windows from the interior side was near on impossible, all culminated in the powers-that-be investigating the possibility…

…of having the windows replaced with an operable product that would allow cleaning both interior and exterior sides from the roof.

You might click on the photo to get a better view of the elaborate scaffold we had to come up with to span over the pool. Back to cleaning the windows, the only type of window that fit that bill once all the factors were considered, was an out-swing hopper window.

You might say an awning window would work, but you’d just about need to pretty much lie on your back on the roof to wash the interior side on an awning window, given the proximity of these openings to the roof.

Of course, one of the obstacles we ran into was the fact that nobody made an out-swing hopper window.

So we purchased Milgard Aluminum Awning windows and turned them upside down. We came up with our own latching system for use on the exterior. Interior latches would of course, have served no useful purpose.

We field prepped the windows for a weep-hole system in what was originally the top of the windows, now of course serving as the bottom, and we installed overhead drip-caps to deflect wind-driven moisture from gaining access at the top of these windows turned upside down.

Milgard’s sizing constraints necessitated that each array of sash consist of twice as many sash or glass-units as was original.