The result, a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car, supporting a forty-foot mast and a hydraulic boom arm attached by six strands of wire rope to a telescopic cleaning basket, houses a computer that monitors sixty-seven electromechanical safety sensors and switches, and runs around the roof of the Hearst Tower on four hundred and twenty feet of elevated steel track. The task fell to the company’s vice-president of engineering at the time, Lakhram Brijmohan, who has spent a thirty-year career developing cleaning rigs but had never seen anything like the “bird’s mouths.” Designing and building the machine took a team of Tractel engineers three years. In early 2002, Foster + Partners’ associate architects approached Tractel-Swingstage, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of scaffolds and window-washing platforms, based in Toronto, to provide a solution. But there was no means of making them accessible to a window cleaner. These would have the effect of making the finished building look like a colossal, finely cut jewel. When the architect Norman Foster initially presented sketches for the Hearst Tower, the first skyscraper approved for construction in Manhattan after September 11th, one of the questions the building’s prospective owners asked was: How are we going to clean those windows? Foster’s proposal featured curtain walls of glass and stainless steel hung in a diagonal grid that met at each corner of the structure in a dramatic chamfer, a zigzag bevelled edge formed of four concave diamond shapes, each sixteen feet deep and eight stories high, known as “bird’s mouths” by the architects. Menzer chuckled as he showed me the machine for the first time. Together they prepared to go “over the side” in the basket of the most complex window-washing rig in New York. Carrying a checklist on a clipboard, he was joined by Ron Brown, fifty-eight, and Janusz Kasparek, fifty-five. He wore dark-blue overalls, a yellow fall-protection harness, and heavy gloves. to travel to Hearst from his home in Queens, and clocked in at five. Menzer, a soft-spoken, bearded fifty-four-year-old with a nervous laugh, narrow blue eyes, and a thick shock of brown hair, was the rigging foreman of the tower’s window-cleaning crew. The weather was clear and cold five hundred feet above the street, the rooftop was silent except for the hum of giant air-conditioning fans. Shortly after dawn one December morning, Bob Menzer rode the freight elevator to the forty-fifth floor of the Hearst Tower, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, and opened the door to the roof.
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