American Airlines Headquarters

The American Airlines campus in Texas is truly massive: it features a 600-room training and hospitality complex, room for 12,000 employees, and serves as a home-away-from-home for the airline’s team members both local and international. In the spirit of honoring employees, innovators, and the adventurous and forward-looking tenets of the industry, they wanted a design that reflected both the past and the future of aviation. To make that vision a reality, Nanometer implemented an innovative approach to the installation of stretched-fabric luminaires.

The Town Square: This four-story central hub is the “Town Square,” an open, airy space that facilitates connection and communication. Multiple levels provide spaces for various needs, including collaborative and individual work, socializing, dining, and wellness. Connecting four buildings, it can be considered a mirror of how airline hubs around the world connect cities and cultures.

The round Nanometer fixture in the ceiling, surrounded by stretched fabric “fins,” provides ambient light while also calling to mind an airplane’s turbine, and the circular shape reinforces the idea of a central gathering space and a sense of equity across the various roles at American Airlines.

A new way to install fabric luminaires: American Airlines wanted a series of narrow triangles for lighting their conference room, reminiscent of airplane wings. With the precise shape and the number of luminaires required for the design, the traditional install procedure would have been arduous and likely would have resulted in error. In order to avoid the headache, Nanometer simply reversed the steps.

One of the concerns with cold-stretch fabric luminaires, especially in an irregular shape, is how it interacts with the surrounding ceiling. Installing the drywall first creates a rigid environment that necessitates creating a luminaire to exacting measurements. The margin for error is high, and errors are time-consuming and costly.

By building the luminaire as a fixed shape and then surface mounting it, the whole luminaire can be made to higher tolerances only possible in the factory. By doing this, the installing contractors are able to build the drywall to the fixture, creating a seamless transition without the challenge of interpreting complex drawings.

Prioritizing the fixture means a much more controllable environment. Because the fixture is prebuilt, the installation process becomes exponentially more predictable, which means more shapes and dimensions are possible.