Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion

The Glass Pavilion is a free-standing addition to the Toledo Museum of Art with exterior and interior walls of glass. The interior glass walls form the galleries, and the cavities between the interior and exterior walls allow for ventilation and heating. The structure combines unorthodox solutions for steel framing in the roof and concrete framing in the floor to allow circulation of services in the thinnest possible depths. The steel roof consists of a moment-connected beam and girder horizontal grid and has a maximum structural depth of 12in for spans of up to 50ft. The concrete floor is made up of shallow, wide band beams with one-way slabs to create many linear slots through which to feed the HVAC from below. Machined round bar columns form pin connections at the top and reduce the diameter to 4 1/4in. Exposed vertical steel plates serve as both column and shear panel to combine vertical and lateral support with an extremely thin profile.