SAANA, a Tokyo-based architectural firm, is owned by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. They have won the Pritzker – the highest honour in the world of Architecture & Design.

Let us see how SAANA has used glass in creating the extraordinary designs that won them the Pritzker.

1.    Reinventing coexistence with glass

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art is located in the center of Kanazawa, one of the nation’s historical centers, on the north coast of Japan. The building contains community gathering spaces, a library, lecture hall, children's workshop, as well as museum spaces. The variously proportioned rooms placed inside the circular building - the model based on a chain of islands or an urban space - signify the centers that generate values originating in the maldistribution of decentrism and polycentrism, and in remote regions.

A walk inside along the curved glass of the exterior facade smoothly unfolds a 360 degree panorama of the site. Four fully glazed internal courtyards, each unique in its character, provide ample daylight to the center and a fluent border between public zone and museum zone. The scattered location of the galleries provides transparency with views from the periphery into the center and vistas through the entire depth of the building. The transparent corridors encourage “coexistence” in which individuals remain autonomous while sharing personal space with others.

Gallery spaces are of various proportions and light conditions - from bright daylight through glass ceilings, with a black-out possibility, to spaces with no natural light source. Their height ranges from 4 meters to 12 meters. The design that allows the visitor to decide on the route through the museum, combined with the flexible gallery rooms that can adapt to every type of media, guarantees the trans-border diversity of the programs that will be held in the space. The intention behind all of these elements is to stimulate the visitor’s emerging awareness.

Specificity to each gallery space is a benefit of the building concept and has been fully explored. The museum can be entered at many places and explored from all directions. Visitors can walk completely around the building inside the glass perimeter. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art has central exhibition spaces surrounded by areas for municipal services such as a library, a workshop for children, and a conference room. There are four inner courtyards enclosed by glass, and many of the rooms have skylights to provide diffused natural light.

Site area: 26,000 square meters
Building area: 9,500 m2
Total Floor area: 17,300 square meters
Completed: 2004

Client: The City of Kanazawa
Archtitect: SANAA
Structural engineer: SSC/ Sasaki Structural consultants
Mechanical engineer: ES Associates
Electrical engineer: P.T.Morimura & Assoc., LTD
Landscape: SANAA
Furniture: SANAA

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

2. The Glass box- The Christian Dior Building , Omotesando
   
The Dior building is a showcase for Dior's designs, a fairly straightforward trapezoid box in Tokyo's center of fashion, Omotesando Avenue. While the box itself is unexciting - though modulated by some variety in floor height, articulated by the bands around the building - the building's showpiece is its skin. The clean, square, outer skin of clear glass covers a second skin inside, of translucent acrylic. This gives the external facade the gentlest of hints at what is inside (while revealing nothing), and provides a glowing blank canvas for seasonal additions.

Designed by experimental Japanese architect duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, known collectively as SANAA, the building is a pristine white box with sharp edges and occupies the entire trapezoidal site.

Couture dress, the ultimate beauty in fashion, is the main source of inspiration for this new creation. Standing at 30 m tall, it seems to be like an eight-storey high building with a dramatic double-skin façade of transparent flat glass on the outside and softly curved, white translucent acrylic panels on the inside, reminiscent of the drape of a dress. White stripes are printed on the acrylic walls so that the building's appearance changes beautifully depending on the light during the day and the level of penetration of lighting at night. A few white horizontal aluminium bands further break the continuous volume into several unequal segments. This slender white box speaks of an elegant femininity that enables it to stand out effortlessly along the star-studded street. Not revealing entirely what is behind the white drapes, it exudes an air of mystery that invites one to step into the luxury world of Dior and explore.

Internally, a different world awaits revelation. Instead of the eight floors of boutique space perceived earlier from the street, there is only one basement floor and five above-ground levels. The basement and the first three floors are devoted to the various retail lines under the Dior umbrella; there is one multi-purpose event space on the fourth floor and a rooftop garden above. The reason for this apparent misrepresentation of floors is the enlargement of mechanical space from the minimum requirement of 1.5 m to greater heights that befit the overall façade composition. Instead of hiding them, SANNA expressed and skilfully incorporated them to create a slender volume that built right to the maximum allowable height. The legibility of spaces is aided by the varying degree of transparency whereby the mechanical spaces are the most opaque.

The interior of the building might be eclectic, but the thermoformed acrylic drapes manages to manifest a coherent image that symbolises Dior's femininity and arouses one's imagination at the same time. When looking towards the cityscape from inside, one seems to be in a fairyland engulfed by this cloud of fuzzy whiteness.

The Christian Dior Building

3. Interconnected transparency - The Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion

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-storey volume penetrated by courtyards with sightlines through layers of transparent walls, the visitors 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.

The Toledo Museum of Art glass pavilion showcases glass artworks and glass-making studios. Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based architecture firm SANAA chose to design the building primarily out of glass. Except for opaque walls enclosing toilets, plumbing, roof drains, elevators, and diagonal bracing, all exterior and interior walls are made of curved glass.

Completed in 2006, the glass pavilion in Toledo, Ohio (USA) is an annex across the street from the Toledo Museum of Art. The pavilion was the first US building by SANAA, who also designed the 2007 New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, a pile of offset boxes. That project also features a partially glass exterior, although a metal mesh façade gives the building a more solid look. The Toledo project lies in a park, next to a century-old grove of trees. SANAA avoided cutting any of them. The glass walls of the single-story building give museum-goers a sense of connection to the trees.

Structural components

Except for delicate steel columns, the building structure is hidden above the ceiling. One interior volume also contains a solid plate steel wall that provides lateral bracing. The light roof rests on these structural members, so the glass walls bear no load, and the roof appears to float.  The façade features two parallel glass walls with a gap between them. And this aspect continues throughout the interior. In a typical building, one wall divides two spaces. But in this museum, any two galleries have two walls of curving glass between them. A cavity of nearly 1m lies between the layers of glass. The size of the gap varies, because the walls curve in irregular ways for the sake of variety.

Daylighting

Using glass on this scale introduces a host of benefits and challenges. In most museums, sun control is essential, because ultraviolet light quickly fades paintings and fabrics. But when exhibited artworks are made of glass, the rules change. A slightly reflective Verosol curtain inside the exterior wall contains aluminium particles that reflect heat, light and UV light out of the building.

After an extensive daylight analysis, SANAA created three internal courtyards. The purpose was to reduce glare, which generally comes about when there's a high degree of light contrast. The courtyards reduce glare by bringing daylight to the middle of the building. The cavities between the layers of glass act as invisible insulation in both exterior and interior walls. That is, they collect any heat that penetrates the glass. The air temperature in the cavity remains somewhere between that of the exterior and interior temperature.

The glass ovens generate considerable heat. In the summer, fans pull heat out of the building. And in the winter, heat from the ovens enters the cavity and warms the rest of the building. Noise bounces off hard surfaces such as glass. The acoustic plaster ceiling absorbs some of this noise. A movable interior curtain (used to make interior spaces bigger or smaller) also helps to deaden the noise. The finished building does have some reflections, but they help create a pleasant, nuanced experience. The reflections and varying light conditions filter the view through the building, making the glass transparent at times and reflective at others.

The installed glass is quite strong and poses little danger of shattering. The exterior glass is 2.5cm thick. When the design team tested a full-scale mock-up by throwing rocks and bricks at it, the glass walls survived.

Location: Toledo, Ohio, USA
Client: Toledo Museum of Art
Architect: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA
Team: Toshi Oki, Takayuki Hasegawa, Keiko Uchiyama, Mizuki Imamura, Tetsuo Kondo, Junya Ishigami
Built area: 7,000sqm
Site area: 20,000sqm
Opening: 2006
Structure: Guy Nordenson & Associates / SAPS
Glass consultant: Front Inc
Lighting: Arup / Kilt Planning
Photos: Iwan Baan

The Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion

4.The glass Design - Zollverein School of Management and Design,Essen

The Zollverein School of Management & Design will be the first new building on the historical coal-mining Zollverein site; declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001. The design, a cuboid structural shell, picks up the basic functional and effective idea used by the original Zollverein architects Schupp and Kremmer.

The oversized cube, which measures 35 meters by 35 meters and is 35 meters high, reflects the dimensions of the Zollverein mine. The seemingly coincidental organization of the openings, windows in three different sizes, creates an unusual interaction with the surroundings and the interior. The building has four floors with ceilings of varying height as well as a roof garden. The idea of stacking open floor plans was developed in compliance with the demands made by the various functions. A multi-level presentation hall, exhibition and foyer areas for public use, and a café, are located on the ground floor. The Design Studios on the second floor will be a production level, home to the creative workplaces. The library is on the third floor together with open, glazed seminar rooms as well as several separate, quiet workplaces along the north-east facade. The fourth floor is the office level, with working areas of various sizes and characters, divided by glass walls. Windows in the exterior walls and appropriately distributed lighting will guarantee daylight and visual connections for all workplaces.

The garden on the roof can also be used on a temporary basis, and will serve above all as a viewing platform over the Zollverein World Heritage Center. The Zollverein School will act as a bridge between teaching, research, and practical implementation in relation to the planned Design Park as the Zollverein grows and prospers as a design location.

Total area: app. 5,000 square meters
Construction start: March 2005

Client: Zollverein School
Architects: SANAA
Project architect: Nicole Berganski
Associate architects: Böll & Krabel
Masterplan: Rem Koolhaas OMA
Landscape: Agence Ter

Zollverein School of Management and Design

5. New Musem of Contemporary Art, New York 

Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo firm SANAA have designed the seven above-ground floors as a stack of displaced boxes, each one shifted off-centre from the level immediately below or above. The boxes don't step back in a consistent Empire State Building sort of way but rather in an irregular sculptural fashion. The attention-getting exterior differs markedly from the neutral interior. With the exception of electric-green elevator interiors and bright cherry blossom tile mosaics in the lower-level restrooms, the museum features polished grey concrete floors and white walls, as well as exposed diagonal structural members. Ducts, sprinklers, and fireproofing material are also quite visible.

SANAA designed the interior to be inviting but straightforward, so the architecture would not overwhelm or compete with the art. Furthermore, the architects chose to expose the innards of the building in order to match the honesty of the Bowery's workaday businesses. At the lobby level, the workings of the museum are particularly apparent. From the outside, one can see the entire ground floor through a pane of glass that stands nearly 15ft tall and stretches the width of the site. This glassy wall even affords behind-the-scenes views of the loading area. The luminous feeling continues inside the entranceway, with a soaring glass wall that separates the 1,525ft² main space from a 1,120ft² gallery illuminated by skylights. Glass partially encloses an interior stairway leading from the lobby down to the cellar level.

Meanwhile, the mushy exterior motif also continues inside. A serpentine screen of metal mesh separates the museum store from the lobby. And a floating screen of metal mesh softens the largely visible functions of the ceiling, filtering light from a grid of fluorescent tubes.

New Musuem of Contemporary Art

6. Naoshima Ferry Terminal, Naoshima

The Naoshima Ferry Terminal is set on a small island in the Inland Sea of Japan. The terminal area is sheltered by a large roof measuring approximately 39,000 square feet. Glass walls enclose the waiting area, cafe, and visitors’ center.  Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa began the project in 2003. The Naoshima Ferry Terminal was completed in 2006.

Naoshima Ferry Terminal

SOURCE: www.glassisgreen.com