Michener Museum Pennsylvania (USA)

Gold for design excellence - glass pavilion made of TG-THERM^®

„We expect of museums that they should be constructed as miracles of architecture and this project will not disappoint our visitors in this respect“, said Bruce Katsiff, Director of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania. 

In May 2012, the museum celebrated the glamorous opening of the Edgar N. Putman Event Pavilion its new multi-functional event space for readings, jazz concerts and weddings. The space covers 250 m² and is enclosed on three sides by sheets of glass made of TG-THERM^® up to 1,682 x 7,011 mm in size. The frameless design protects the terrace and provides visitors with both a virtually unobstructed view of a historic prison wall and access to the museum‘s sculpture garden.

The plan drawn up by Kieran Timberlake Architects from Philadelphia to place a modest, transparent jewellery box in the garden of the museum was awarded the Gold Medal for Design Excellence by the Philadelphia branch of the American Institute of Architecture.
The 5 million dollar project posed some very specific challenges as far as glass finishing, logistics and installation were concerned. Thiele Glas was responsible for finishing the glass. The Wermsdorf site manufactured the TG-THERM^® insulating glass delivered to the Roschmann Group, which was made from three layers of TG-PROTECT^®-TVG as the outside sheet and two layers of TG-PROTECT^®-TVG glass as the inside sheet, all in clear glass. With a total thickness of 70 mm, the sheets weighed in at 1,500 kg each, which presented a huge challenge when it came to transport and installation. For the installation work, the Roschmann Group in the USA sent to Pennsylvania a special glass suction unit of which there are only a few in the world. A technique specially designed for this project for lifting the sheets by controlling the pressure applied to them was required to make installation possible at all. 

The result was an architectural miracle, in which „the space is the star“, as the jury noted in explaining its award of the prize.