Front Inc. is a facade engineering and consulting practice based in New York that works with architects on building envelopes, specialty structures and complex glazing, typically from concept through design assist and performance testing. The firm is facade consultant on the $250 million repositioning of 60 Wall Street, where Kohn Pedersen Fox has opened the podium of the 1989 Kevin Roche tower with triple-height windows, dropped a skylight over a new full-block public atrium and added a grand staircase down to the Pine Street subway entrance. Habitat Horticulture is delivering the 100-foot interior living wall on the same project. Envelope work on an occupied or partly occupied repositioning is a distinct discipline from new curtain wall design, because the existing structure sets the limits on what a new facade can weigh and where it can be anchored.
Front was established in New York City in 2002 and now describes more than 500 completed projects worldwide. The practice also operates as Front Architecture DPC, a separately registered licensed architectural practice in the State of New York, which is what allows it to carry design responsibility rather than advise from the sidelines.
Founding principal Marc Simmons is a licensed architect in New York State with over thirty years in building envelope design. His project list includes the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, the Canadian Parliament West Block in Ottawa, and the Perelman Center for the Performing Arts in New York. He has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Toronto, served as Associate Professor of the Practice at MIT, and held the Ventulett Chair of Architectural Design at Georgia Tech.
The published portfolio makes the range legible faster than any description: the New Museum expansion with OMA, the Amazon Spheres with NBBJ, the Kimbell Art Museum expansion with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Seattle Central Library with OMA and LMN, 660 Fifth Avenue with KPF, Shenzhen Energy Headquarters with BIG, Grace Farms with SANAA, the Pérez Art Museum with Herzog & de Meuron, the Google Bayview campus, CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, and the Century Project at the Space Needle with Olson Kundig. Longwood Gardens’ West Conservatory and the Canadian Parliament House of Commons sit in the same list.
Offices are in New York on East Broadway, Atlanta on Peachtree Street, San Francisco on Mission Street, and San Giovanni Lupatoto outside Verona in Italy. The Italian office is the tell: envelope consulting that stays close to European fabricators is a different service from one that hands off a specification and hopes.
The firm’s own account of what clients ask it to solve is worth quoting in outline, because it maps neatly onto the trade-offs that decide facade packages. Cost efficiency, schedule and constructability sit on one side. Environmental performance, adaptive reuse, branding, media integration, resiliency and security sit on the other. Front positions itself as the party that reconciles the two from first principles rather than by precedent.
Note for anyone holding an older link: frontinc.com now redirects to front.global.
