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Design Antenna wins DuPont Benedictus Award for first all laminated glass building

Broadfield House Glass Museum in Kingswinford, England

British architectural firm Design Antenna won the 1995 DuPont Benedictus Award for Innovation in Architectural Laminated Glass for the new Pavilion of the Broadfield House Glass Museum in Kingswinford, England. Cited by the judges for its "absolute perfection of detail", the Pavilion was designed by Brent Richards of Design Antenna in partnership with the structural engineering firm of Dewhurst MacFarlane and Partners.

The Pavilion consists of a triple-glazed roof with double-glazed cladding panels for the façade. It is a self-supporting structure built entirely of laminated glass and at 11 meters long, 3.5 meters high and 5.7 meters wide is probably the largest self-supporting all-glass building of its kind ever built. It uses glass beams and columns fashioned from three sheets of plate glass laminated together to form 32mm thick structural frames, to support a glass roof and walls.

The construction of the roof panels is of particular interest because they rest on the upper edge of the beams and were designed to create a comfortable working climate within the Pavilion by moderating the extremes of hot and cold. The roof's outer layer of glass is 'Cool-Lite K 169 Neutral' a specially coated glass manufactured by St. Gobain in Holland. By using 'Cool-Lite' and fretted glass, solar energy entering the building is controlled to less than 37% with an overall U-value of 1.7 W/m^2oC.

Judges for the 1995 Benedictus Award were Thomas Beeby (FAIA) principal, Hammond, Beeby and Babka Inc. of Chicago; Dan Hanganu (FRAIC), principal, Dan Hanganu and Associates of Montreal and Fumihiko Maki (Hon FAIA) principal Fumihiko Maki and Associates of Tokyo. This year's Benedictus Award competition attracted entries from every country in Europe, the USA, Japan, Australia and Scandinavia.