PITTSBURGH – PPG received three 2018 Chairman’s Awards – including the top honor – from the Metal Construction Association (MCA) during the organization’s winter meeting in Key Largo, Florida, Jan. 14-16. PPG was the only coatings manufacturer recognized with awards.

PPG received the highest honor for the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center at Cornell Tech, which earned the Chairman’s Award for Overall Excellence. Located on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, the building features a metal-panel rainscreen finished with iridescent PPG DURANAR^® VARI-COOL^® coatings. The rainscreen serves as a protective insulating barrier as well as a color-shifting wall of art for the 160,000-square-foot structure.

Fabricated by A. Zahner Co. of Kansas City, Missouri, using the company’s proprietary louvered ZIRA™ system, the rainscreen features more than 335,000 perforated circular tabs, with each programmed to function as an individual pixel. Together with PPG Duranar VARI-Cool coatings, the tabs enable the rainscreen to depict the New York City skyline and the gorges of Ithaca, New York, which is home to Cornell University’s main campus.

MCA member Precoat Metals of St. Louis, Missouri, coated the metal along with W&W Glass and Island Exterior Fabricators of New York. Morphosis Architects of New York was the building’s designer.

In the Education – Colleges and Universities category, PPG was recognized as the coating manufacturer for the Austin Community College Campus Center in Leander, Texas. Pittsburgh-based Centria, an MCA member, produced and coated the panels.

PPG was also heralded as the coating manufacturer for the IBEW Local 134 Headquarters/Union Hall in Chicago, which earned the Chairman’s Award in the Commercial/Industrial category. 3A Composites in Mooresville, North Carolina, supplied the project’s wall panels, and Sobotec in Hamilton, Ontario, fabricated them. Both companies are MCA members.

“The Chairman’s Awards reinforce PPG’s legacy of leadership and innovation in the architectural metal coatings industry,” said Rodolfo Ramirez, PPG Director of Sales and Strategic Segments for North America, Industrial Coatings. “All three of these projects highlight our ability to work with architects, specifiers, designers and applicators to create innovative metal coatings solutions for their projects. These awards are among the most coveted in our industry, and I am proud that PPG was the only coatings manufacturer recognized during this year’s ceremony.”

Introduced in 1967 as of one of the industry’s first high-performance polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) coatings for metal building components, PPG Duranar coatings have provided color and protection for many of the world’s most recognized landmarks for more than 50 years.

PPG has continually refined the technology to meet evolving aesthetic, performance and sustainability demands of architects and building owners. PPG Duranar VARI-Cool coatings, which are featured on the Bloomberg Center, are a recent example. These coatings combine pearlescent color-changing pigments with proprietary PPG ULTRA-COOL^® infrared coatings technology to deflect heat away from buildings to keep them cooler.

The annual Chairman’s Awards recognize exceptional building projects involving MCA members. The awards are based on overall appearance, the significance of metal in the project, innovative use of metal and the role of metal in achieving project objectives.