TORCH, 740 Eighth Avenue – New York, NY, USA

Customer and Site Information

740 Eighth Avenue, known as TORCH, is a tower under construction in Manhattan. AME holds the building management system scope for the building, working with United Air Conditioning as mechanical contractor and AKF Group as engineer.

Delivering controls on a tower still under construction means the system has to be designed, staged and commissioned against a live build sequence, floor by floor, rather than fitted to a finished building.

Advanced Integration and Customer Requirements

AME’s scope covers both the central plant and the floor by floor terminal equipment, with equipment tagged at floors up to the sixtieth. The mechanical systems the control layer serves include the following.

• Three cooling towers and a central chiller serving the tower.
• A twelve-boiler heating plant.
• Heat exchangers at the third, twentieth, thirty-ninth and fifty-second floors.
• Air handling units, outside air units, energy recovery units and make-up air units.
• Water source heat pumps, water cooled condensing units, and computer room air conditioning and air handling units.
• Fan coil units, variable air volume terminals with reheat, and fin tube radiation.
• Snow melting manifolds across eight zones, and chilled water manifold zones at the sixtieth floor.

Innovative Features

• Central plant and high rise terminal equipment carried on one supervisory layer from the outset rather than integrated later.
• Distributed heat exchange at four intermediate floors serving a tall building’s vertical zoning.
• Snow melting and specialist manifold zones brought onto the same platform as the base building systems.