The new building of the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, houses an extensive collection of glassware, from ancient Egyptian incense vessels to works by contemporary artists. There are also temporary exhibition halls and glass-blowing workshops.
The building is a kind of version of the "Glass House" by Philip Johnson. Despite the significant area of 3000 sq. m, the one-story building is almost transparent: standing on one side, you can easily see the park, people and cars on the other, through 15 layers of glass - the outer and inner walls of the museum, which bears the obvious name "Glass Pavilion".
The flat roof is supported by slender steel supports and partitions hidden behind white plaster. The walls are made of glass of high transparency, low iron content, consisting of panels fixed in grooves in the concrete floor and in the ceiling. The goal of the architects was to make the border between the interior of the pavilion and the park in which it was built as transparent as possible.
The transparency of the walls of the SANAA building is combined with the complexity of its plan, "letting in" the natural surroundings. This impression is enhanced by three green courtyards, which serve as a kind of additional lobbies where visitors can relax.
A particular challenge in the design was the need to combine exhibition halls with valuable exhibits and glass-blowing workshops for local artists and students of art schools in one building. Some of them were placed underground (the basements of the pavilion are as large as above ground), but the rooms with ovens, where the glass mass is heated to a temperature of 1600 degrees Celsius, are located just across a narrow corridor from the galleries. The architects managed to create the necessary heat and sound insulation without disrupting the general appearance of the building, but there is an important positive aspect in the inclusion of workshops in the complex. Since they are open during the opening hours of the museum, they bring dynamism and an element of performance to the exposition, as well as a variety of colors and light: thanks to the transparency of the partitions, burning glass furnaces cast reflections on the exhibits even in the distant halls of the museum.
