ACP-affiliated union construction craftpersons, under general contractor Rudolph Libbe Inc., helped build the Toledo Art Museum’s new, critically acclaimed $30-million Glass Pavilion, which opened in August 2006 to much fanfare. The Glass Pavilion was named “Best Museum” in Travel + Leisure magazine’s 2007 Design Awards.
The 76,000-square-foot Glass Pavilion, with its curvy structure of 472 glass panels, houses the institution’s world-renowned glass collection, studios for making decorative glass, a restaurant, outdoor courtyards and a meeting room.
Designed by SANAA Ltd., a Japanese architectural firm, the building appears to be supported by the glass panels – but in reality, a thin wall of rolled steel plus 35 strategically placed slender cylinders of the same material hold up the steel roof, with help from some cross-bracing embedded in three other opaque walls on the ground floor.
The outer- and inner-wall glass panels were placed in tracks along both the ceiling and the floor, allowing just an inch or two of movement as the building shifts.
A nearby conference center houses the cooling towers and pumps, as well as an emergency generator, with the pipes running underground to the Glass Pavilion. The remaining building systems are in the pavilion’s basement, which was expanded from half the total space to run the length of the building. The basement also houses studio, classroom and work and storage space.
The Glass Pavilion also was a unique project because it is home to both the museum’s celebrated glass collection and a working space for area glass blowers, and therefore needs opposite environments – cool and dry with exact temperature control for the glass pieces, super hot for the two hot shops where glass is made. The Glass Pavilion houses three heating and air-conditioning systems that are separate from each other and can be regulated to the needs of a specific space. Embedded coils in the floor of the hot shops also allow the heat from the furnaces, which can reach 2,400 degrees, to be reclaimed and reused,
Also special to the building process was the use of an on-site testing structure that duplicated features found in the glass pavilion. It was 16 feet tall with an exterior wall made of the same three-quarter-inch-thick laminated glass that mirrors the exterior of the pavilion, and it has some interior walls made of glass, just as the new building. The testing facility helped avert costly mistakes. |
