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Bendheim Channel Glass Project Highlights: Nelson Atkins Museum & Shaw Center for the Arts

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This editorial content was originally published in the Architect’s Newspaper, June 2005 edition.
 
Glass Menagerie
Since Joseph Paxton used almost a million square feet of glass to cover the Crystal Palace in 1851, architects have been experimenting with it in projects of every size, type, and context. For our annual Glass issue, we look at four projects that use the material in fresh ways. From the structural advances of a dome in Stuttgart to the conceptual layering of a house in upstate New York, the glass in each of these projects does much more than just let the sun in.
 

 

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri by Steven Holl Architects

Steven Holl’s expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has been garnering awards since its design was unveiled in 1999, and now that the glass cladding of the five-volume addition is near complete, it looks as if the early praise was well founded. With the opening of the museum still a year away, the glazed envelopes are beginning to express Holl’s winning concept of a series of “lenses” that traverse the museum’s terraced sculpture garden.
Holl decided to break the 165,000-square-foot expansion into five interconnected, irregularly shaped low buildings rather than attach a single massive structure to the existing museum, a Depression-era Beaux Arts building, sited at the top of a 17-acre sloping park, designed by Dan Kiley. The all-glass cladding of the new volumes offers a striking counterpoint to the original building’s heavy stone facade. Connected via substantial underground spaces, the buildings appear as isolated glass pavilions, their milky skin bringing light into the galleries and, at night, illuminating the garden’s path that wind around them. Holl compares them to Noguchi’s Akari lamps.
Holl and project architect Chris McVoy refer to the five volumes as “lenses” because of the way they bring light into the galleries and subtly reshape one’s views of the space. According to McVoy, the volume’s forms were driven in part by the idea of a parallax view, or the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in the position from which it is viewed. For example, the lens containing the lobby and the library begins on axis with the original museum, and then shifts slightly to lead one back towards the other new volumes.
The outer layer of the lens is double-interlocked glass planks with translucent insulation in between them. Though Holl had worked with similar industrial glass planks for the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, German manufacturer Lamberts worked to develop a new product specifically for this project, tested to ensure that they could span 18 feet without support, as well as meet standards for waterproofing and light transmission. The glass is also low in iron content, increasing its whiteness and minimizing the coloring the light that would shine on the art. The inside surfaces of the glass were sandblasted for further light diffusion. The inner layer is laminated, low-iron, butt-jointed glass, with a translucent white interlayer and acid-etched surface that provide for white light diffusion.
Between the layers of glass is a 3.5-foot wide cavity that, along with an upper-level plenum, provides a place for heat to gather in the winter or exhaust it in the summer. On southern walls, the cavities host a computer-controlled system of movable shades that darken the galleries as needed.
Holl’s design is an elegant and complicated proposal for making a glass wall, creating perhaps the most spectacular daylighting conditions for art seen in this country since Louis Kahn designed the Kimbell Museum.

Author: WILLIAM MENKING

Theater/Galleries

Shaw Center for the Arts,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Schwartz/Silver Architects
The Shaw Center for the Arts, which opened on March 4 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is not what it seems: While the theater and gallery building is clad entirely in glass, there is only one major window (albeit a big one) and it is anything but flat and reflective. The Boston-based firm Schwartz/Silver Architects devised a rain screen of channel glass that cover the building’s corrugated aluminum skin, and gives it an improbably light and insubstantial quality. The channels are set vertically, with short edges facing outward to better catch sunlight and shadow and give the façade texture.
According to principals Warren Schwartz and Robert Silver and project architect Chris Ingersoll, they wanted the building to evoke the movement of the waters of the Mississippi on whose banks it sits, and to borrow its colors from the reflection of the sky on the river. “One day late in the afternoon, we saw the building change from gray to blue to gold to pink over the course of about 20 minutes,” said Schwartz. At night, the screen is lit from outside, so that the light fills the channels.
If the glass screen is a metaphor for the ripples of the river’s waters, it is a practical one. Hurricanes frequently hit the region, and the heavy rains can do significant damage to buildings by seeping into the walls. Rain screens work on the principle that a small cavity between a screen and a building’s wall system-in this case, eight inches-ensures that the pressure inside the walls is not lower than the pressure outside, thereby keeping water from being forced into the walls. They saw the process at work when they tested the strength of the channels, which are reinforced with thin wires embedded in the glass. Ingersoll said that after a DC-9 engine blew water in a simulated 100 mile-per-hour wind at a mock-up of the façade, there was no water in the cavity between the rain screen and the wall, just a fine mist.
The system that keeps the channels anchored to the wall behind them is a straightforward one that is fairly common in industrial buildings in Europe. Horizontal bands capture the channels at top and bottom, and intermediate clips that tie back into the wall stabilize each one along its length. The anchoring system is visible through the glass, and from afar, the bands and clips read as an irregular horizontal pattern on the façade, some light and others dark as if just out of reach underwater. The Shaw Center is the largest building to date to use glass channels as a cladding, but its noteworthiness comes not from its size: It turns the prosaic need for protection from the elements into something that capitalizes on them.

Author: ANNE GUINEY
Glass Credit
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art:
Exterior double-locked glass planks (Lamberts); insulation (OKALUX); laminated low-iron panels (Cricursa)
Shaw Center for the Arts:
Linit, U-profile hammered pearl glass (Bendheim Wall Systems Inc.)

Lycée Francais Campus Showcases Bendheim’s Channel Glass

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This editorial content was originally published in Architectural Record, March 2004 edition.

Polshek Partnership maintains an old school’s elegance while delivering space, light, and unity to its new building.
by Sam Lubell
Lycée Français’ new campus on Manhattan’s Upper East Side offers a study in contradictions. Divided into north (Upper School) and south (Lower School) towers and linked in the center by common spaces, the building alternates between spacious and intimate, Modern and traditional, practical and elegant, urban and insular. The architect, Polshek Partnership, has skillfully integrated a wide array of competing needs into a building program that was demanding even by New York City standards.
Program
The French school made the difficult decision to leave its beautiful (but cramped) Beaux Arts town houses, scattered on six sites throughout the East Side, in 1999. Completion of the new quarters in 2003 made Lycée Français the first independent school in Manhattan to build a new facility in decades (like the Lycée, New York’s other schools had for years been adding new buildings as needed in a piecemeal fashion).
Before the move, says Yves Thézé, the school’s head, students of various ages had little sense of connection with each other, while most spent considerable time in transit. Thézé says he took an average of twenty cabs a week, shuttling between the school’s various buildings. Thus the new location provides more space and modern facilities and also, Thézé says, a school spirit and a sense of community that was long-missing.
But accommodating 1,250 students and faculty once housed in six buildings into one, 158,000-square-foot space was not achieved without a struggle. Another formidable effort was incorporating the cherished elegance of the school’s former buildings, as well as the strict French desire for order, into a sleek Modern building that had no interest in trying to imitate the past.
Solutions
With space at a premium, Polshek first pushed areas with no need for natural illumination, like the gymnasiums and auditorium, underground, through extensive excavation.
Above ground, the firm employed horizontal sight lines throughout the building to maximize the appearance of space. For example, one can see straight into classrooms on the north side from carefully aligned rooms on the far south.
Tall spaces at the school’s “coeur”, or heart, utilize both vertical and horizontal connectivity to enhance feelings of volume. Here, Polshek maximizes the central area by stacking a simple yet refined courtyard above the commons, a large room vital to maintaining community. Skylights illuminate the commons, which is also bordered by a two-story glass curtain wall. The Wall’s tall windows establish a visual connection to the adjacent two-level “grand escallier”, from where they also allow a look into the floating courtyard. Views into the courtyard from around the building not only augment the perception of nature and give students an intimate sense of orientation at all times.
The sense of height in the building is amplified by vertical bends of green-tinted channeled glass on the north-facing facade, which draw the eye skyward. These graceful windows, whose reflected light produces a gentle radiance, contribute to a reserved and elegant school that maintains a sleekness true to the modern form. (Vertical bands of precast concrete and clear windows on the south-facing facades are not nearly as effective in this respect). The interior light produced by the channeled glass is warm and glittering. “Students are mesmerized”, explains Polshek Principal Susan Rodriguez. Yet somehow, the added light enhances concentration, while the window grid’s pattern reflects the rigorous order demanded by French learning, evidenced by classrooms of almost uniform size and shape throughout.
Commentary
While the building has quickly suffered the scratches and knocks expected for an edifice serving more than a thousand youngsters, evidence of its success can be found in the top floor art room, where Upper School teacher Tim Riordan works.
Riordan, a professed claustrophobe, finds his ample new space bathed in natural light (and space, thanks to skylights adjoining the fifth and forth floors), in contrast to the former school’s art rooms located in the basement. He and his students freely express delight. “It’s and inspiration just being in the classroom”, he says. Most teaching rooms are equally blessed with light, thanks to a hallway layout that puts smaller staff rooms on each tower’s inside and larger classrooms on the outside. In such a tight space, the preference for student over staff space makes it easy to see where the school’s priorities lie throughout the building. “The students come first here”, says Rodriguez.

Bendheim Architectural Glass Showroom Featured in Interior Design Magazine

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This editorial content was originally published in Interior Design, September 2002 edition.

Art of Glass
by Shonquis Moreno
A TriBeCa interior by Boschen Design, Architecture, emphasizes the aesthetic range and multiple applications of Bendheim’s product.
In 1927, Margaret and Sem Bendheim established a business importing mouth-blown glass from Europe. In 1958, their son-in-law, who had taken over, moved from the original space, in the West Village, to a building farther downtown. During the 1980s, Bendheim developed a line of handblown glass specifically intended for such restoration projects as the White House and Monticello. Now the company has upgraded its New York presence at a TriBeCa loft. With three times the capacity of the previous showroom, downstairs in the same building Bendheim has occupied for 44 years, the 1,000-square-foot space displays thousands of types of glass. Product comes in sheets as big as doors or as small as 8 by 16 inches.
Credit for these improvements goes to Richard Boschen of Boschen Design, Architecture. Boschen saw the job as a chance to demonstrate the aesthetic and functional range of Bendheim’s architectural glass, giving designers and developers a playful hands-on experience. A stupendous 8,000 pounds of glass are presented on three sets of 15 sliding steel racks, all hanging from boomerang-shape tracks. (The tracks are suspended via open web joists a few feet from the ceiling, so its handsome pressed tin remains visible.) Racks are positioned to be viewed both from the center of the showroom, looking toward its south-facing windows, or from the showroom’s perimeter, looking toward the center, for “inside” and “outside” perspectives. Each rack contains from one to 24 modular samples Velcro’d into metal frames, allowing clients to remove pieces and experiment with them in various contexts: in the backsplash of a cabinet, wall-mounted, or inserted into a tray that projects different types of fiber-optic light: halogen, fluorescent, incandescent. “Glass is a very tactile product,” says senior vice president Donald Jayson as he pulls a whorled sample from its frame.
The showroom has also become a forum where clients and Bendheim can brainstorm together. “We do our own research and development. Designers use us as a think tank,” says Jayson, who now runs the third-generation business with brothers Steven and Robert. A steel accordion wall efficiently divides the space into two meeting areas, with the same 1,000-plus samples available to each. Of the three sets of sliding racks, the end sets hold identical merchandise, while the middle set is shared.
Another kind of wall, this one composed of Bendheim’s innovative Linit U-Profile plank system demonstrates how glass can today reach heights previously unattainable in North America. A wall comprising a grid of glass sheets – etched, mirrored, or layered with rice paper, ginkgo leaves, plastic, or bulletproof material – glows in a Jolly Rancher rainbow. “It’s like a candy store,” says Boschen. “For architects.”