Take a spicy mixture of the visual and performing arts; add a wide range of support from university, government and civic sources; cover with an unusual application of glass and stir; serves 250,000. That’s the “recipe” for the Shaw Center for the Arts, which Baton Rouge, Louisiana is counting on to lift its civic profile.

This building might seem more likely in Rotterdam or Paris than in a medium-sized, generally conservative southern U.S. city. Its form was driven by a complex program that sought to accommodate the two lead “anchor” institutions, the Louisiana State University Museum of Art and the Manship Performing Arts Center.

At one end of the building, a 322-seat theater is served by a fly loft at the upper reaches. The opposite end stretches north over the lobby and extends as a cantilever above the 1930s-era “Auto Hotel” parking garage and terminates with an upward thrust that marks a clerestory window for the museum’s changing-exhibition gallery. A clear glazed central space serves as the main entrance for the entire complex.

The drama of building’s exterior massing is heightened by a facade clad in hundreds of multilength cast-glass channels. The Shaw Center is said to be the largest building in the United States to be completely clad in U-shaped cast glass and the first to use the channel glass as the rain screen for a wall system.

The Shaw Center, which opened in early March, 2005, is the result of a collaboration between Schwartz/Silver Architects as design architects, New Orleans-based Eskew + Dumez + Ripple as executive architects, and Baton Rouge-based Jerry M. Campbell and Associates as associate architects.

“The building’s facade is conceived to evoke many local associations: a paper lantern, glass beading, the meandering Mississippi,” says Warren R. Schwartz, FAIA, principal of Schwartz/Silver.

“It may at first seem counterintuitive to glaze an entire building that has relatively few windows,” adds Christopher B. Ingersoll, a principal at Schwartz/Silver and project director for the Shaw Center. “But the end result is a building that protects the valuable collections within while forming a memorable image on the city’s skyline.”

When Boston-based Schwartz/Silver was hired in 1998 to design a new art museum for Louisiana State University 12 miles (19 kilometers) east of downtown Baton Rouge, the architects proposed a low-rise building with wide overhanging roofs and deeply shaded loggias. This design approach was grounded in the regional traditions of Louisiana, which boasts some of the nation’s most iconic southern plantation houses.

But even as that design was being approved, a new chancellor at the university, in meeting with city and state officials and major nonprofit entities like the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, recognized an exciting potential: combine the museum with the LSU School of Art, with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge’s adaptive reuse of the Auto Hotel, and with a performing arts center already in the planning.

Halting its original plans, LSU presented a challenge to Schwartz/Silver in 2000: create a new design for the LSU Museum of Art, this time atop the Auto Hotel, and develop a master plan for a multiuse “Arts Block” in the heart of downtown Baton Rouge.

Early in redesign, Schwartz/Silver considered a number of cladding systems, among them prepatinated copper and glass channel. While the initial budget would not accommodate the glass channel system, there was some enthusiasm to pursue that option, so mockups were constructed on the site to demonstrate to the steering committee that channel glass would give depth and visual complexity to the building’s surface while serving practical ends.

Specifically, the proposed facade was composed of two layers – an outermost layer of channel glass and an inner layer of corrugated aluminum – serving as the weather barrier, with an air gap between layers to create a rain screen configuration. During the development of the cladding system, technical tests demonstrated that even in the heavy rains common in the region, the channels reduced the water to a mist in the cavity, thus functioning as a true rain screen.

To heighten the visual effect of the vertical channel glass, the architects specified channels in two different widths and various lengths. The channels are supported in the usual way, at top and bottom by horizontal aluminum members, but the horizontals are broken and sometimes overlapping, lending a syncopated rhythm to the exterior.

The channels are braced back to the structure with aluminum clips where required to resist wind pressure. Two-inch (5-centimeter) gaps between the channels allow them to perform the rain screen function for the aluminum wall system located six inches (15 centimeters) behind.

U-shaped channel glass is most commonly used with the flanges facing inward for applications where natural light with translucency is desired, as in a hospital. However, Schwartz/Silver found that outward-facing flanges added more texture to the building’s outer surface and added to the visual complexity.

The facades of the Shaw Center have channel glass with the flanges outward over most of their surface. However, at the building’s lower levels, the flanges are pointed inward to prevent accidental damage. This is especially important given that the plaza with an interactive fountain outside the building is a favorite gathering spot for locals and a venue for concerts and other public events.

Baton Rouge is only 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland from the Gulf of Mexico. To test the glazing system against hurricane-force winds, a mockup was produced and placed in front of an old DC-3 airplane propeller to simulate wind-driven rain and for 100-mile- (160-kilometer-) per-hour wind pressures. Additional tests were done in Germany by the glass channel vendor, Bendheim Wall Systems.

Another dramatic design element of the building is the 40-foot (12-meter) cantilever over the existing Auto Hotel. Accomplished through the use of multiple steel trusses, the cantilever prevents the older structure from being overwhelmed by the new. It also frees up roof space to allow the informal display of sculpture.

A bar/restaurant leading to a roof garden and sculpture terrace cap off the Shaw Center and have already become one of the city’s most photographed destinations. This diverse mixture of uses is at the heart of the vision for the Shaw Center, which within three months of opening had begun to show signs of being the economic catalyst that was the founding group’s intention.

The Shaw Center is an important part of an emerging “arts and entertainment district” in Baton Rouge which will include a new state history museum, Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Center, the Louisiana Art & Science Museum, the USS Kidd Museum, and a hotel/casino. Schwartz concludes: “the Shaw Center is the centerpiece of the whole district, so it had to command attention.”

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.

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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.

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Theater/Galleries

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.

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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.)