對妹島和世及西澤立衛來說，這件作品可說是另一個里程碑，在歐洲的礦業同盟設計管理學院（Zollverein School of management and design）於七月底落成，接著是 Glass Pavilion，宣告 SANAA 的設計版圖正式延伸至美國大陸。
俄亥俄州精彩的建築作品越來越多，未來建築迷們的朝聖之旅地圖又得把這片土地列入考慮囉！
電腦模擬圖
施工相片
現場相片
↗ SANAA 建築師事務所設計之 Toledo Glass Pavilion 外觀
Just as theater-in-the-round radically changes the relationship between actors and audience, so the new Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art subverts many of the old rules of displaying art. By using mostly clear-glass walls for both the building's envelope and its interior partitions, the architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo firm SANAA have performed the museum equivalent of stripping away the proscenium stage and creating a more fluid dynamic between art and viewer. Materials and boundaries disappear, corners dissolve, front and back no longer apply. The building provides spatial drama using a remarkable economy of means, but at the same time creates a series of challenges for the museum's curators.
The 76,000-square-foot pavilion houses the museum's impressive collection of more than 5,000 pieces of glass art and sits in a small park across Monroe Street from the institution's Neoclassical main building. Placing glass art in a glass building seems like an obvious strategy, but turns out to be quite tricky to pull off. For example, how do you protect artworks from ultraviolet rays? How do you display them when most walls are transparent and traditional mounting techniques are impossible? Usually straightforward decisions—such as where to locate a thermostat—become difficult puzzles in an all-glass gallery.
Sejima and Nishizawa love wrestling with such design dilemmas. In their 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, they figured out how to place square galleries in a circular glass building and move visitors through a mazelike interior with few traditional hallways. And at the New Museum now under construction in New York City, they have devised an intriguing way of stacking metal boxes off-axis to bring daylight into the galleries. When the Toledo Museum picked SANAA in 2000, it gambled on a young firm known by very few people outside of Japan. Today, SANAA is one of the hottest Japanese firms, with projects all over the world, including a recently completed design school in Essen, Germany; a theater in Almere, Holland; a museum in Valencia, Spain; an office building in Basel, Switzerland; and the Louvre II in Lens, France. The Toledo Museum's gutsy call looks nothing short of prescient now.
The Glass Pavilion's site imposed a number of constraints on its architects. To the south, it faced the main museum's 1912 colonnaded front and Frank Gehry's 1992 Center for the Visual Arts. To the north and west, it needed to address the residential scale of the Old West End, a leafy, affluent neighborhood of Victorian and Edwardian houses.
