Glass Pavilion at Toledo Museum, Toledo USA – SANAA
The annex to the Toledo Museum of Art is both an exhibition space for the museum’s glass collection, and a glass making facility. Conceived as a single one-story volume penetrated by courtyards with sightlines through layers of transparent walls, the visitorís experience will always involve the surrounding greenery. Individually, each space is enclosed in clear glass, resulting in cavity walls that act as buffer zones between different climates; museum exhibition spaces, the glass making hot-shop, and the outdoors. The plan is derived from a grid of various rectilinear shapes reflecting programmatic adjacencies, with room-to-room connections achieved using curving glass surfaces. Glass is wrapping the spaces forming continuous elevations, uninterrupted by corners. The visitor flows with the form through a series of interconnected bubbles.
” ‘Without a glass palace, life becomes a burden,’ the poet Paul Scheerbart wrote nearly a century ago. Standing in front of the new Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, designed by the Japanese team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, can reawaken that belief in the power of glass to enchant” – Nicolai Ouroussoff, New York Times
