Design Antenna's Pavilion at Broadfield House Glass Museum has glass beams and columns which required a new approach to glass technology.
An innovative all-glass building makes an appropriate entrance of Broadfield House Glass Museum
Kingswinford, West Midlands. The building known as the Pavilion, creates a visitors entrance, reception area and retail area at the back of the museum, a Grade II-listed building whose refurbished galleries tell the story of English glass. They contain the largest collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century English glass in Europe, specialising in pieces from nearby Stourbridge. Brent Richards of Design Antenna believes the Pavilion to be the largest structure ever to be built using glass beams and Columns to support a glass roof and glass wall - no metal connectors are used.
Although in concept the structure is similar to Rick Mather's all glass conservatory in Hampstead (AJ 22.7.92), it has several significant differences it is three times as large requiring close control of tolerances and other problems in manufacture; it is a public rather than a private space and, with a local authority rather than a private client, was built to a much tighter budget. Where as Mather's conservatory faces north, the Pavilion had to fascia south-west with attendant problems of solar control.
The Pavilion is 1lm long, 3.5m high and 5.7m wide; it is built against the rear wall and projecting side wall of Broadfield House, and its gable end is of rendered blockwork. In principle the structure is relatively simple: 5.7m long x 300mm deep glass beams at 1 l00mm centres span from the rear brick wall to 3.5m high x 200mm glass columns along the front facade. The beams and columns are made of three sheets of 10mm glass laminated together, making them 32mm thick. At the rear the beams rest on shoes fixed to the wall; at the front they were connected to the columns by cutting and splicing the laminated sheets to form mortis and tenon joints which were bonded onsite with resin laminate.
The roof is made of glass panels which rest on the laminated beams. As the building faces south-west they were fabricated form three pains: a 10mm toughened upper of St. Gobain Cool-Lite K 169 Neutral, which has a microscopic deposit of silver sputtered on to its inner surface to reduce solar gain, a 10mm air gap and two toughened 6mm pains laminated together. The inner pain is fitted with a ceramic coating in a pattern of white bars which run parallel to the front facade. Towards the rear of the building, the proportion of hinted bars to glass increases to protect the reception desk at the rear from solar gain. The combination of Cool-Lite glass and fitted glass reduces the solar energy entering the building to less than 37 per cent and the overall U-value of the budding is 1.7W/m2c.
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The panels rest on the laminated glass beams - In fact the two edges of adjacent panels had to rest precisely on the 32mm thickness of each beam. (imagine the accuracy required in setting out the 110Omm centres of the glass beams to fix 10 roof panels with such precision!) The fitted bars on adjacent panels also had to align exactly.
The panels were bonded to the top of the top of the beams with a 6 x 6mm one-part structural silicon bead (Dow Corning 895) with a rigid foamspacer-tape backing. The gap between the panels was waterproofed by a black low-modulus, silicone rubber weather seal (Dow Coming 797) with a foam backing. The roof slopes 1.5 degrees to a rear gutter. It is designed to 0.75N/m squared for snow loading, making it strong enough for it be walked on for cleaning.
The front facade consists of 3.7m x 1100mm high double glazed panels: a combination of an 8mm toughened outer pain of Cool-Lite K 169 Neutral, a 1Omm air gap and an 8mm toughened inner panel, which allows only 59 per cent of solar energy to enter the building while admitting 61 per cent of natural daylight. A pair of glass doors set in the facade is the main entrance. The opening movement loads of the doors and the roof loads above them are carried by a glass lintel, 2.2m wide and box shaped in section, which was constructed from 10 separate pieces of glass.
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