High-strength steel is enabling sustainable design

Minimizing Carbon,
Maximizing Design 

Nucor partnered with Turner Construction Company, Banker Steel, and NYC Constructors to develop, fabricate, and erect a creative approach to the building’s structural components using Aeos™ A913 steel.

Aeos is a sustainable, high-strength structural steel that features superior weldability and toughness, backed by a team of collaborative experts from Nucor Construction Solutions. The product’s high strength-to-weight ratio and flexibility enabled an economy of material that made it uniquely suited to solving the Spiral’s complex engineering and sustainability challenges.

By reducing the overall quantity of steel required to build The Spiral, the project team avoided thousands of tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fewer perimeter columns and smaller column sizes also translated into improved interiors with more usable space for tenants, a key component of The Spiral’s biophilic design. As Nucor is the only domestic provider of A913, building with Aeos created the opportunity to further reduce emissions relative to imported alternatives.

The benefit from having higher-strength, lighter material, [is] less effort in the fabrication process and less impact on the environment.

Aeos is as sustainable as it is strong. The product contains 95% recycled content and is made using Nucor's circular, electric arc furnace (EAF) manufacturing process. Nucor is a leading pioneer in this recycling-based process, which has an emissions intensity that is less than one-third the global average of extractive steelmaking methods using blast furnaces for Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

Like all Nucor steel, Aeos can also be certified Econiq™ signifying that it was produced using electricity from 100% renewable sources (eliminating Scope 2 emissions), with the option to offset any remaining Scope 1 emissions.

Building the green economy of the future means choosing sustainable solutions today. As new tenants flood into The Spiral’s forward-thinking office space, the building’s groundbreaking design, enabled by Aeos, highlights new possibilities for sustainable architecture.

Nucor’s construction partners avoided 11,429 tons of emissions by building the Spiral with Aeos beams instead of standard A992 beams.

That’s equivalent to eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions from an average New York City apartment building for more than a year.