Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Steven Holl Architects designed two new buildings in the Museum District in Houston, Texas. Knippers Helbig is the facade consultant of both projects.

The “Glassell School of Art” is a wedge-shaped art school consisting of a series of large scale precast concrete panels separated by horizontal in-situ concrete beams. The gaps between the concrete panels are filled with punched windows with dimensions of up to 24 ft x 19 ft.

The challenge in this project was to realize Steven Holl’s architectural vision of pure materiality on a “prehistoric” scale with minimal details. The facade was finally constructed with a ½” gap between the large scale translucent IGU’s and the adjacent concrete structure. The facade has to resist cladding pressures of up to 120psf.

The project shall be completed February 2018.

The “Nancy and Rich Kinder Building” is a fine arts exhibition building. The galleries are lit by natural daylight coming through translucent clerestory glazing and a series of translucent glass tubes and windows. Lighting fine art paintings and exhibits by natural day light turned out to be a challenge on its own and required sophisticated simulation and coordination of glass specifications such as combinations of several interlayers, coatings and acid etched glass surfaces.

The vertical concrete walls and translucent IGU’s are covered by approximately 1,000 translucent gravity bent glass tubes with spans of up to 19’6” and a radius of 15 inches.

A series of visual mockups and performance tests have been executed during the design and construction phases in order to determine the structural capacities, post breakage behavior and the ideal glass makeup.

Due to the amount of gravity bent glass and budgetary constraints, the glass is supplied from large Chinese glass bending firms, while the facades are fabricated by Gartner in Germany – which finally leads to a challenging supply chain and quality control procedure. The project is under construction and shall be completed in mid-2019.