Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article “The Ascent of Glass” by Jeffrey Hogrefe (©2001 by the Smithsonian Institution).

One of the most striking of the transparent glass buildings that are appearing like ghostly apparitions in cities around the world, the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan marks a new age in glass architecture. Not since the early 1950s, when sleek, green-tinted glass buildings like New York City's Lever House rose amid the stone canyons of countless major cities, has glass elicited so much attention. There are so many glass buildings currently on the drawing boards or under construction, in fact, that it is hard to keep track of them all. "Glass is back," says Kenneth Frampton, professor of architecture at Columbia University and author of Modern Architecture: A Critical History. And now it's taking center stage.

Like the Rose Center, many of the new glass edifices are signature buildings. That is to say, the structure itself is used to communicate a message to the public about the occupants' underlying philosophies. "We wanted to build a structure that would say science," says Rose Center lead designer James Polshek. In the year since the Rose Center opened to the public, it drew crowds beyond the wildest expectations of the museum's directors. Many people go just to see the pristine glass cube, which houses the spherical aluminum Hayden Planetarium as if it were a ship in a giant glass bottle. The museum's directors were initially reluctant to give the green light to such an experimental system of glass construction because nothing like it had been used here in the United States. Although many of the icons of early glass architecture rose in U.S. cities during the years after World War II, since the energy crisis of 1973 most of the advances in glass architecture have taken place in Europe. The directors approved the design only after a trip to France to see the building's prototype, the Cite de Sciences & l' Industrie, in Paris. Completed in 1986, the museum used an innovative structural device designed by the Paris-based firm of Rice Francis Ritchie. The system suspended the glass wall in front of a series of metal trusses and braces that held the glass panels in a state of tension.

Glass has many virtues. It lets in light, and brings the outside in and the inside out. Glass is also impervious to the effects of most harsh chemicals and thus is less susceptible to damage from acid rain, which eats away at masonry buildings. Furthermore, advancements in glass production since the 1973 energy crisis have resulted in revolutionary changes in its performance.

Kenneth Frampton sees the return to glass buildings as a symbol of progress. "We do see glass coming back, and with the comeback it has to be effective environmentally," he says. "The early glass curtain wall was only slightly more efficient than no wall." The new glass is not only spectacular to look at and through, it is also more efficient and much safer than the old glass. Stringent energy codes have led to many innovations. Glass is now being manufactured with special coatings that adjust the thermal intake for all four directions of the compass and even allow for the increased intensity of the sun at certain latitudes. For the new LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) building, which opened in midtown Manhattan in 1999, more than 30 different types of glass were used in the curtain wall in order to meet New York City's energy codes and create an arresting facade of contrasting textures and colors.

Old glass buildings, too, are benefiting from the improvements in glass. Completed in 1952, Park Avenue's Lever House was one of the first glass-walled buildings in Manhattan. Construction was recently finished on a two-year renovation, undertaken because the original glass had begun to crack. The structure has now been completely reclad with a new, stronger version of the glass originally used in the building.

“Glass is being argued as a new material," notes architect Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University. "It's being rediscovered after a generation of architects who rejected it."

Glass can serve as a lens, revealing and bringing into focus the interior of building—as in the Rose Center, and in the award-winning Hillier Group design for the power plant that supplies electricity to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. The inner workings of the plant are exposed to view through the building's transparent glass walls. Unlike traditional power plants, which disguise themselves as other types of buildings, the JFK design is as honest as it is bold. "The underlying point of the design was that power is beautiful" says project architect David Finci.