If there were a prize for the project most often mentioned during the conference “Engineered Transparency: Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering,” it would go to the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, designed by Tokyo-based SANAA. The first to present the building was SANAA principal, Kazuyo Sejima, in her keynote address on September 26 for the two-day event at Columbia University, in New York City.

Several of the subsequent more than 30 speakers, including architects, engineers, manufacturers, and academics, cited the 76,000-square–foot, one-story building, which houses the museum’s collection of glass art, for its minimal structure, transparency, and seeming simplicity. For example, New York City-based Guy Nordenson, the Toledo project’s structural engineer, discussed the pavilion as a manifestation of “infrathin,” a term coined by Marcel Duchamp, but used by Nordenson to describe structure that seems to disappear. The Toledo project’s immateriality is so pronounced that Nordenson thought the floor plan was a bubble diagram when first presented with it at SANAA’s offices. So attenuated are the building’s steel columns, he said, that the joints between 8-foot-wide pieces of glass could just as easily be read as structure.