Reflection Window + Wall

Reflection Window + Wall is a Chicago facade contractor that Rodrigo d’Escoto founded in 2001. The company engineers, prototypes, manufactures and installs window wall, curtain wall, storefront, punched windows and cladding, and it runs the design-assist and estimating work that comes ahead of the glass. It’s grown from a Chicago high-rise specialist into a national enclosure firm with eight U.S. offices, including New York, Philadelphia, Nashville, Dallas, Denver and San Francisco, and ENR Midwest has named it specialty contractor of the year. In the West Loop, Reflection is supplying triple-glazed windows for Chicago’s first all-electric geothermal apartment tower, where a tighter envelope keeps the 65-bore geothermal field smaller.

The reason to look closely at this company is the chain it controls. Design and engineering, budgeting and estimating, manufacturing and prototyping, project management and field installation are all handled in house, and the company describes those teams coordinating schedules, budgets, logistics and quality control together while holding to the architect’s intent. On a facade package, that normally involves at least three separate firms.

The product range is set out by system type: window wall, curtain wall, facade cladding, storefront, punched windows and operables. Those are not interchangeable. Window wall sits floor to floor and ships largely finished, curtain wall hangs past the slab edge, and punched windows sit in solid walls, so a project’s structure and budget usually decide which is viable before design begins.

Prototyping is the step worth noting. Building a sample assembly before production catches the sequencing and water-management problems that are expensive to discover on a hoist at the twentieth floor.

The company describes itself as a national architectural building enclosure business, headquartered in Chicago with projects throughout the United States and eight U.S. offices, which it frames as local presence at national strength. Its project pages are split between completed work and projects coming soon.

Pre-construction is named as a specialism alongside engineering and project management, which in facade terms means design-assist work: joining a project early enough to shape the enclosure design against a real budget rather than pricing a finished drawing set.

The Chicago office takes enquiries on 773-772-5343, and the firm publishes team and careers pages for a workforce it describes as passionate about architecture, design and innovation.