Bonded Glass Tubes as Translucent Jacket of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston – Design, Engineering and Testing

Abstract

The “Nancy and Rich Kinder Building” is one of three new buildings being constructed as part of the redevelopment of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston Campus. From the outside, the building is almost completely wrapped in translucent hot‐bent semicircular tubes made of laminated glass (“Cool Jacket”). The glass tubes not only serve as a design element, they also regulate the incidence of daylight and reduce the energy entry into the building. An almost invisible fixing was realized by the use of special structural glazing profiles on the inside of the glass tubes. Both the glass tubes, which are exposed to high thermal stresses, and the adhesive joints, which have to withstand high wind loads, required detailed finite element calculations as well as experimental investigations. The article describes and evaluates the calculations and experiments as well as the design and installation.