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, in Ohio, designed by SANAA [RECORD, January 2007, page 79]. The first to present the building was the Tokyo-based firm’s 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 30 speakers, including architects, consultants, and manufacturers, cited the one-story building that houses the museum’s collection of glass art, for its transparency, minimal structure, and seeming simplicity. New York City–based Guy Nordenson, the 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 joked he thought the plan was a bubble diagram when he first encountered it at SANAA’s offices.
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