Draped in a Translucent Gown

BAROZZI VEIGA

Phil­har­mon­ic Hall, Szczecin, Poland

Find­ing inspi­ra­tion in Expres­sion­ism, this Span­ish archi­tec­tur­al stu­dio designed a vast phil­har­mon­ic com­plex in the Pol­ish sea-side city of Szczecin. The struc­ture was built in 2014 and its most dis­tinc­tive fea­ture is the dra­mat­ic roof, which con­sists of numer­ous sharply tilt­ed gables and cuts an irreg­u­lar pro­file. The ver­ti­cal build­ing seems fold­ed in on itself, and the facade is coro­nat­ed with alu­minum and trans­par­ent ribbed glass, seem­ing to give it an icy crown. After sun­down, the build­ing shines with a white glow, spec­tral and almost immaterial.

KENGO KUMA

MEHRIN Muse­um, Brno, Czech Republic

The Japan­ese architect’s win­ning pro­pos­al for the Mora­vian Jew­ish Muse­um traces sym­bol­ic cir­cles and con­nects them into organ­ic spi­rals. The entire con­cept is based in the idea of free, flow­ing motion. The museum’s indi­vid­ual floors include the exhi­bi­tion spaces, a vast library and a relax­ation zone, and are screened by the mate­ri­als of the build­ing itself while remain­ing open to the world by means of round­ed glass pan­els which con­sti­tute the over­all out­door walls.

MAXIM VELČOVSKÝ

Wall in End­less Motion

Woven Wall was cre­at­ed to ful­fill the needs of the most demand­ing archi­tects and make their design visions of hotel lob­bies, res­i­den­tial build­ings or busi­ness spaces a real­i­ty. Due to the flex­i­ble tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions, the solu­tions are offered in the round­ed shapes of the let­ters U and C, as well as in oth­er forms one may come up with.

Opočenský Valouch Architects

LASVIT Head­quar­ters, Nový Bor, Czech Republic

The head­quar­ters of the Lasvit com­pa­ny is built on the tra­di­tions of the sur­round­ing glass­mak­ing region. Two new build­ings were added to two already exist­ing his­tor­i­cal sites, and were designed in the form of tra­di­tion­al, two-storey hous­es used by glass­mak­ers in the past. Both the facade and the roof of the cen­tral build­ing are cov­ered by cus­tom-made glass shin­gles and tiles. Their com­po­si­tion copies the pat­terns of slate shin­gles tra­di­tion­al­ly used in the region’s gables and roofs, and the sur­face of the glass also mim­ics their textures.

PETR HÁJEK

Glass House, Prague, Czech Republic

The fore­most Czech archi­tect Petr Hájek cre­at­ed a sketch spe­cial­ly for this pub­li­ca­tion, in which he designed a glass house for a vacant plot in the cen­ter of Prague. And because the plot has the shape of a glass shard, this motif nat­u­ral­ly inspired his pro­pos­al. The entire house is made of glass, has trans­par­ent walls, stair­cas­es, floors and roof. The build­ing hous­es an imag­i­nary sec­ond-hand book­shop designed to keep 333 000 publications.

WANDA VALIHRACHOVÁ

Imag­i­nary Building

This design by LASVIT’s young design­er makes clear that a glass facade needn’t be a flat sur­face encas­ing the entire struc­ture. In this par­tic­u­lar case, the hexag­o­nal tiles can be used as a high­ly dec­o­ra­tive fea­ture which ben­e­fits the struc­ture aes­thet­i­cal­ly. “I placed a glass frag­ment on the imag­i­nary build­ing, and it adorns it like some pre­cious jew­el,” com­ments the designer.