Excel was contacted by Super Stud Building Products, Inc. to design all the exterior cold-formed steel (CFS) framing for the Hotel Indigo in New York for one of their clients. The building is a 28-story hotel. The superstructure consists of concrete floors supported by concrete columns/stair towers, with the exterior walls being non-load-bearing CFS spanning from slab to slab. The architect presented a nontraditional first-floor feature window that would require special detailing to resist the loads.

The lead engineer on the project's inspiration came from an old bartender’s challenge, which involves suspending a bottle between three other bottles using nothing more than three knives (if you can solve it, you receive a free beverage from the establishment). All it takes is the correct placement of the three base bottles and some careful interlocking of cutlery to create a surprisingly stable platform on which to balance the final bottle. With this inspiration came an additional question: Can the CFS be detailed like the bottle challenge, creating self-supporting cantilevers? Eureka – problem solved!