Building Workshop, in association with Davis Brody, LLP, and Body Lawson Associates of New York, the science center has led us to expect great things of its construction. In fact, the center won the Ceramics of Italy 2017 Tile Design Competition in the Institutional category. MAPEI at work on the jobsite Jantile, Inc., of Armonk, N.Y., won the bid to install the ceram- ic tile throughout the project. As always, coordination with other trades played a role in the instal- lation, but thanks to general con- tractor Lend-Lease, with whom Jantile frequently works, all went smoothly. The main challenge dealt with accurate transitions from space to space. Because the Jantile crew was working with such large tiles over vast expanses of open space, and because the glass facades shed so much light on the space, the installers had to be exceptionally careful lining up tiles with each other and other surfaces on each of the eight levels. The first and largest component of the project for Jantile was the preparation of the space prior to setting tile. The core structure of the building is steel with a glass facade for the shell. Because the subsurface was steel, each of the eight upper floors had to be pre- pared with a mud bed measuring 2.5” (6,3 cm) in thickness. First, the crews put down a slip sheet and covered it with mud and wire rein- forcement. The installation crews then combined MAPEI’s Planicrete® AC, a liquid latex admixture, with the mud bed mix to enhance its performance. Once the mud bed cured, it was covered with MAPEI SM Primer™ and Mapeguard™ 2, a thin, lightweight crack-isolation and sound-reduction sheet membrane. FEATURE: MAPEI products used in award-winning project Lots of light meant exacting transitions. 36 TileLetter | September 2017