Glass Entrance Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam

Abstract

In September 2015 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has opened its new Glass Entrance to accommodate a growing number of visitors more comfortably. The architectural design is drawn by Kisho Kurokawa Architect & Associates and the detailed design by Hans van Heeswijk Architects and Octatube, complementing the curved and elliptical shape of the Kurokawa wing. The project fits in a trend of underground museum extensions enhanced by prominent structural glass geometries, such as the Louvre Pyramids in Paris, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Joanneum Quarter in Graz. The Van Gogh Museum Glass Entrance is featured by a spheroidal glass roof with glass fins stabilising the steel structure, a cold bent glass facade and a 1.5 m cantilevering glass canopy. Inside there are glass balustrades and a glass staircase supported by structural glass arches which are site-bonded to the stringers. All glass in the project is composed of low iron glass to create a high degree of transparency without discolouring. The shape of the glass roof is defined by mirroring the spheroidal surface of the existing wing. The so created roof consists of insulated and laminated glass units all different in width and supported by 30 triple laminated glass fins with SentryGlas® (SG) interlayers. All glass fins are optimised and unique in length and height, the largest fin being 12 m long and 700 mm in height. The glass beams are supported by steel shoes connected to the main steel structure consisting of 400 mm circular hollow sections. This detail allows the glass fins to act like beams while stiffening the steel structure and supporting and stabilising the double glass units in the roof. Due to the complex geometry, the many glass fin connections and extremely tight tolerances, the entire steel structure of 60 m × 15 m × 10 m was pre-assembled, surveyed and checked in the factory scale 1:1. The IGU’s in the roof’s outer 1.3 m wide perimeter are cold-twisted to fit in between the roof surface and façade perimeter. The curved outer facade consists of cold-bent insulated glass units fixed to 20 unique triple laminated glass fins with SG, the longest being 9.4 m. The smallest bending radius of the elliptical curvature is 11.5 m.