Glass Struct. Eng. DOI 10.1007/s40940-016-0022-5 CHALLENGING GLASS PAPER Glass Entrance Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam Joeri Bijster · Chris Noteboom · Mick Eekhout Received: 24 December 2015 / Accepted: 21 April 2016 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 Abstract In September 2015 the Van Gogh Museum with SentryGlas (SG) interlayers. All glass fins are in Amsterdam has opened its new Glass Entrance to optimised and unique in length and height, the largest accommodate a growing number of visitors more com- fin being 12 m long and 700 mm in height. The glass fortably. The architectural design is drawn by Kisho beams are supported by steel shoes connected to the Kurokawa Architect & Associates and the detailed main steel structure consisting of 400 mm circular hol- design by Hans van Heeswijk Architects and Octatube, low sections. This detail allows the glass fins to act like complementing the curved and elliptical shape of the beams while stiffening the steel structure and support- Kurokawa wing. The project fits in a trend of under- ing and stabilising the double glass units in the roof. ground museum extensions enhanced by prominent Due to the complex geometry, the many glass fin con- structural glass geometries, such as the Louvre Pyra- nections and extremely tight tolerances, the entire steel mids in Paris, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the structure of 60 m × 15 m × 10 m was pre-assembled, Joanneum Quarter in Graz. The Van Gogh Museum surveyed and checked in the factory scale 1:1. The Glass Entrance is featured by a spheroidal glass roof IGU’s in the roof’s outer 1.3 m wide perimeter are cold- with glass fins stabilising the steel structure, a cold bent twisted to fit in between the roof surface and façade glass facade and a 1.5 m cantilevering glass canopy. perimeter. The curved outer facade consists of cold- Inside there are glass balustrades and a glass stair- bent insulated glass units fixed to 20 unique triple lam- case supported by structural glass arches which are inated glass fins with SG, the longest being 9.4 m. The site-bonded to the stringers. All glass in the project smallest bending radius of the elliptical curvature is is composed of low iron glass to create a high degree 11.5 m. of transparency without discolouring. The shape of the glass roof is defined by mirroring the spheroidal sur- Keywords Museum · Structural glass stabilisation · face of the existing wing. The so created roof consists Glass fins · Cold-twisted glass · Cold-bent glass · of insulated and laminated glass units all different in Glass staircase width and supported by 30 triple laminated glass fins J. Bijster (B) · C. Noteboom · M. Eekhout 1 Introduction Octatube, Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] At the opening of the Van Gogh Museum’s Glass Entrance in September 2015, director Axel Rüger C. Noteboom (B) Arup, Amsterdam, The Netherlands recalled how he circumspectly took the plane to Japan e-mail: [email protected] to visit the architectural office of the late Kisho 123 J. Bijster et al. Kurokawa (1934–2007). He wanted to discuss a lit- 2 European precedents tle ‘problem’ with the architects who had designed the museum’s granite-clad exhibition wing in the Europe is home to many old cities which are popu- nineties. Bluntly and without beating around the bush, lar tourist destinations. Over the centuries, these cities the Japanese architects said: “It is the pond, isn’t have preserved a fair amount of their cultural heritage it?”. Apparently, they were very well informed about and compact city centres. Nowadays many buildings the dysfunction of the sunken pool, once conceptu- are labelled as monuments, assuring their future con- alised as a contemplative intermediate space between servation. Apart from churches, it is probably museums Kurokawa’s new wing and the existing museum build- attracting the highest number of tourists. Massive visi- ing of Rietveld. But the pool didn’t quite fit in the tor numbers and the phenomenon of special art exhibi- Dutch climate and often suffered from defects such tions with queues stretching around the block, is known as the broken water flow. A more compelling matter since the Enlightenment (Haskell 2000). In 1851 six for the museum was the notorious length of the ticket million people poured into London to visit the Great queue, causing daily troubles at the small sized pedes- Exhibition in Crystal Palace, and in 1857 1.3 million trian walkway at the Paulus Potterstraat, which was not visitors were attracted to an exhibition of the Old Mas- welcoming for the 90 % foreign visitors. ters held in Manchester (Saumarez Smith 2015). But With the completion of the new wing of the Stedelijk the visitor streams were occurring more and more often, Museum (2012) and the major refurbishment of the queuing in the densely built and already crowded city Rijksmuseum (2013), the time seemed right for the centres. Although these visitors are boosting the local Van Gogh Museum—being the third major museum economy, they impose a logistical headache. In terms of the Amsterdam Museum Square—to embark on of visitor numbers, the leading European museums are its own construction project. By enclosing the empty currently the Louvre in Paris (9.3 million visitors in ‘sunken pond’, and creating a new main entrance, the 2014) and the British Museum in London (6.7 million museum was able to solve two problems at the same visitors in 2014). But even the relatively small-sized time. Without expanding the actual footprint on the Van Gogh Museum had welcomed 1.6 million visitors Museum Square, a new transparent entrance was cre- in the same year. The allurement of museums and the ated on top of the former pool, being a ‘state of the art’ ‘democratisation of art’ is accompanied by a paradox, and innovative glass structure; the primary object of this referred to by van Heeswijk (2015) as ‘the down side paper. of success’: museums are becoming a victim of their In the first section, the role of glass at underground own successfulness. museum extensions is illustrated with three European If one would make a categorisation, there are two precedents. The study of references is followed by types of museum refurbishment projects in which glass an historical and architectural description of the Van plays a major role. The first one is the covered court- Gogh Museum, after which the Glass Entrance is por- yard: an enclosed space for logistics, orientation and trayed in detail, from the preliminary design for the natural light. Regularly courtyards have been the play- glass wing of Kisho Kurokawa Architect & Associates ground for architects and engineers. Whether it is a grid (KKAA) to the detailed design by Hans van Heeswijk shell, a transparent glass fin roof or a bespoke steel- Architects in close collaboration with the designers and glass structure, glass roofs seem to fit well in monu- engineers of Octatube. Hereafter, the structure and its mental museum architecture (Fig. 1). challenges are explained in detail from Sects. 5 to 9: The second category is the underground entrance. the roof structure and its parametrically designed glass With their already heavy footprint in historic city cen- fins, the cold-bent glass façade with its varying bend- tres museums are frequently forced to go below ground. ing radius, the ingenious interface details and the glass In these projects, architects often decide to hide away staircase which could literally and figuratively be con- the most congested area, being the entrance. Interest- sidered as a project within a project. In the conclusion, ingly, this choice conflicts with the purpose of the the Van Gogh Museum’s Glass Entrance is placed in museum entrance to be a visible welcome and identifi- perspective, and it is described why glass structures cation point for tourists who may be first-time visitors. seem to be so appropriate when it comes to museum Whereas the entrance used to be easily recognisable extensions. in a symmetrical classicist facade or renaissance style 123 Glass Entrance Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam Fig. 1 a–d Examples of glass roofs covering monumental museum courtyards. From left to right the British Museum in London, the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, the German Historic Museum in Berlin and the Municipal Museum in The Hague museum building, it suddenly becomes a hidden archi- volume to ingest 15,000 visitors an hour in theory. In tectural space, deprived from natural light. It is the task addition, there are three baby pyramids, one inverted for architects to solve these two problems at once, and pyramid and triangular reflecting pools with fountains, glass has proven to be a very suitable material. Impelled contributing to the quality of the urban space, open- by new structural possibilities and technologies, this ing up the Louvre and making an inviting gesture to has led to a number of museums in which glass struc- the crowds. Another advantage was that the pyramid tures illuminate the underground spaces, mark the new encloses the largest possible floor area within the small- entrance, and facilitate a larger welcome area. est possible volume, so that the building volume would Three projects are described hereafter, all with a very provide plenty of space for the large visitor numbers different architectural and technical use of glass in com- while standing as unobtrusively as possible (Chipley bination with an underground museum entrance. Slavicek 2009). The footprint of the main pyramid is only 1/30 of the courtyard (1000 m2), which provided Pei with a strong argument of architectural modesty 2.1 The pyramids of the Louvre, Paris (Fig.