Prise D’Eau du Canal de L’Aqueduc | Water Intake Facility

Bendheim’s channel glass was selected to fulfill ambitious design goals for a key piece of public infrastructure, located in a public park. To achieve harmony between the water intake facility and its setting, the architects layered an external facade of channel glass over an inner envelope of colored aluminum. The remarkable results of this technique succeed in both expressing and concealing the building’s utilitarian purpose.

The design also creates a striking “pixilated” effect on the building’s exterior, as the vertical glass channels cross the horizontal bands of colored aluminum to form a pattern of squares. According to the architect, the inner aluminum panels — in a graded range of blues — were chosen to reference the “horizontal” quality of water as it responds to gravity. Additionally, the texture of the channel glass diffuses these colors while adding reflections from the sky, ground, and water nearby.