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Glazing for Color and Dazzle

In addition to the Japanese museum, the Benedictus Awards jury also selected a school and a highway tunnel for special recognition. The school for mentally-handicapped children in Berlin, by Grüntuch Ernst Architekten, was designed to "cheer up pupils and teachers on a gray-sky day." The architects wanted to make the school more than just a series of classrooms. It had to be safe and functional but also "exciting and full of new things to explore... balancing modular repetitions and contrasting spaces."

The ample glazing gives the children a visual connection to the exterior environment, and the colored, laminated glass facades help the children with orientation within the school. The high-performance glass maximizes both daylight and the safety required for children with coordination and mobility problems. A glass corridor connects the school to a gymnasium building, reinforcing the transition with changes in color. Teachers report that the resulting combination of openness and security has a calming effect on their pupils.

For the Petuel Tunnel in Munich, Auer + Weber + Architekten wanted to "...get away from the concept of an enclosed space and move towards a traffic structure with an appropriately functional, dynamic, and fluid shape." The 790-foot- (240-meter-) long protective laminated-glass cover was designed to shield the surrounding neighborhood from noise and exhaust emissions, with only a light filigree of steel structure. In areas exposed to vandalism, the glass is about 0.3 inches (8 millimeters) thicker.

Architect Fritz Auer says that engineering constraints regarding unobstructed air flow and cleaning led to the placement of the steel outside the glass envelope, leaving the inside plain and smooth. The wall and roof glazing is suspended under the external steel structure by means of point fixings.

The jury commented: "The architects really took laminated glass here to mean load-bearing glass. The construction is fully pre-stressed and it is fire-resistant. In case of a fire in the tunnel, the lower panel of the envelope drops down and creates an undulation of air that gives an extra 30 minutes of time for egress."

The 2003 DuPont Benedictus program also recognized nine projects with honorable mentions, and Najwan Yassin of the Lebanese American University in Byblosfor won the student design competition.

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The jury included Sylvester Damianos, FAIA, Damianosgroup; Lewis Koerner, AIA, The OK Design Group SRL, Rome, Italy; Julie Vanden Berg Snow, FAIA, Julie Snow Architects Inc; and Santiago Calatrava. The DuPont Benedictus Awards, now in their 11th year, are named for Edouard Benedictus, a French chemist who discovered the process for laminating glass. The competition is organized by the American Institute of Architects and the International Union of Architects.

The jury commented particularly on the Pola Museum of Art's beautifully detailed connection brackets sandwiched between the glass ribs. Photo: Mamoru Ishiguro The museum sits in a bowl cut out of the mountainside to minimize intrusion on the surrounding forest. Image: Nikken Sekkei A school for mentally handicapped children in Berlin, by Grüntuch Ernst Architekten, was designed to "cheer up pupils and teachers on a gray-sky day." Photo: Werner Huthmacher The Petuel Tunnel in Munich, by Auer + Weber + Architekten, sports a protective laminated glass cover to shield the surrounding neighborhood from noise and exhaust emissions. Photo: Stefan Müller-Nauman   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.