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"The Byzantine Chapel Museum is a religious building whose purpose is to restore spiritual significance and function to two thirteenth-century Byzantine Frescoes, a dome and an apse, rescued and restored by the owner … The materiality of the original chapel is shattered and made ephemeral through the fragmented, freestanding sandblasted laminated glass structure which is an abstracted evocation of the original chapel. The infinite is evoked through the play of darkness and light."   Francois deMenil, May, 1997

Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum uses sandblasted laminated glass to restore spiritual significance

A view of the chapel showing the shell of bent laminated glass panels that are perhaps the largest such panels in the world

Francois deMenil Architect PC, New York's "Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum" in Houston, Texas was honored for Special Merit by the Judges of the 1997 DuPont Benedictus Awards. The Chapel Museum uses sandblasted laminated glass panels within a freestanding three-dimensional steel structure to replicate the form and spirituality of a small chapel in Cyprus that once housed the treasured Byzantine frescoes now found in the museum.

Bent laminated glass panels illuminate the chapel and create a sense of open space and freedom.

Sandblasted laminated glass gives ethereal quality

Culturally, this project is important because of the unique approach it represents towards the display of spiritual antiquities. The sandblasted laminated glass panels used as instruments of light are uniquely powerful in the evocation of a sacred space, returning the frescoes to the spiritual significance and function that had been obscured by their removal from Cyprus, in the late 1970s.

The Christ Pantokrator fresco and laminated glass drum, showing the delicate relationship between the ancient fresco and the contemporary glass frame

Structure could only be achieved with laminated glass

Technically a glass chapel structure within the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum could only be realized through the use of laminated glass. The scale and geometry of the glass panels required for the chapel exceeded the fabrication limits of tempered glass. Moreover, both the thickness and the sandblasted finish of the glass panel design would have presented problems for tempered glass. Only by means of the lamination process could the 38mm thick, sandblasted glass slabs be achieved. The use of laminated annealed glass also eased fabrication, insured more precise dimensional control and provided strength required for safety and building codes.

Innovative design

The design is innovative in the way it incorporates the laminated glass panels into a freestanding lightweight rigid structure consisting of a system of tungsten TiG welded steel frames comprised of round bars and pipes. The laminated glass panels, which are engaged by, and interact with, the space frame experience shell bending and in-plane forces. Under lateral movements, caused primarily by people, some of the glass panels are 'engaged' by the space frame and therefore help resist those loads, while others are "disengaged".

Exterior view of the Chapel, showing the spatial relationship between the contemporary and the historical

The laminated glass panels are essential to the overall stiffness of the structure, acting as shear diaphragms to prevent the frame from racking. The resulting composite hybrid system of tensioned steel frame and glass panel is remarkably stiff and may be a unique structural use of laminated glass.

Finally, the project is innovative in the use of laminated glass on account of the size, weight and thickness of the bent laminated glass panels which are the largest that Glass Fabricator Dlubak Corp. has ever executed and may be the largest anywhere in the world.