Structurae

The Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art is a freestanding addition to the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, intended to house galleries for the museum’s extensive collection of art glass alongside publicly-accessible glass blowing workshops. The preliminary architectural design called for a building with a single level above ground approximately 60 m by 60 m in plan with a roof height of 4,5 m. The interior galleries and workshops are typically independent rounded rectangles in plan enclosed by full height glass walls with an inaccessible 0,8 m wide cavity between each room’s perimeter partition. The glass walls visually connect the interior rooms to each other and to the wooded park surrounding the pavilion. The simple image of the Glass Pavilion – the thin plane of the roof floating above a continuous ground line – belies the complexity of the integrated design required to achieve that appearance. The use of glass for the majority of the interior partitions required that the building systems (mechanical, plumbing, and structure) typically enclosed in the walls in most buildings be distributed to other locations or left exposed. In the case of the structure, the resulting coordination to the architecture and building systems required the application of unorthodox solutions for the steel roof framing, steel vertical support and lateral systems, and cast-in-place concrete suspended framing for the ground floor.