Corning Museum of Glass Contemporary Art + Design Wing
2011–2015 | Corning NY
Client Corning Museum of Glass
Architect Thomas Phifer and Partners
Structural Engineer Guy Nordenson and Associates
Awards 2020 AEI Award of Merit Architectural Engineering Integration; 2020 AEI Most Innovative Project under $100M; 2020 AIA Honor Award for Interior Architecture; 2016 AIA NY Merit Award, 2015 SEAoNY Excellence in Structural Engineering Project Finalist Award
This 100,000sf expansion is housed in two structurally independent buildings. It includes a new two-story gallery building to showcase the museum’s collection of glass art and 500 seat amphitheater in a retrofitted factory building.
At the second story, the gallery’s structural system includes a series of 20ft tall cast-in-place concrete serpentine cavity walls. These walls act in tandem with the system of concrete wide and shallow “band” beams of the gallery slab that span between cast-in-place concrete columns and shear walls below. The roof consists of closely spaced, exposed precast concrete joists that are 4ft deep, 3.5in thick and span up to 60ft between the serpentine gallery walls and the steel perimeter structure. These roof joists support and diffuse light from a custom fabricated steel skylight structure.
The adjacent Amphitheater Hot Shop serves as a new venue for live glassmaking presentations. Self-supporting steel plates and mezzanine on steel plate columns reinforce the retrofitted steel structure.
