The Crystal

The building proposed for the Tittot Glass Art Museum is thought as a scaled up crystal.
We thought that the crystal, with its characters of transparency and geometry, could embody and conceptualize very well the idea of glass and its particular beauty.
The project conjugates the characters and the artistry related to the glass manufacture and the methods and process of architecture, through the study and the re-interpretation of a natural form, as for the example a quartz.
The crystal, as found in nature, synthesizes the esthetic related to the glass and its transparency and suggest at same time a geometry to architecture.
What we did was to re-produce the shape and the materiality of a mineral, for a example a quartz, and to transfer them to architecture.

Our building is build just with glass.
The big “Crystal” is shaped in a way to guest all the activities of the museum.
A lower part is reserved to the activities related to the exhibition {offices, tickets hall, workshops, bar and restaurant, meeting room, while a taller volume on six floor contains the galleries and the exhibition spaces; a third smaller volume is attached to the main volumes and is reserved to special events or exhibitions.
The volumes constitutes a continuous geometry, organically assembled or better inorganically connected.
The structure of the building is running parallel to the faces of the glass enclosures and wrap the all building, following a non regular path not and intersecting itself in several points.
The exhibition areas as well the other facilities are expressed through a minimal still consistent language;
The transparency organized trough a precise geometry, is the media and the meaning of the building
We preferred to contain the dimension of the building at 5000 square meter, in order to respect the proportions that the project idea was suggesting and to stay in the 8.2 millions budget for the construction.

We would like that our proposal, very synthetic, clear and powerful, still sophisticated, brought till the end consistently, could become a very recognizable building, representing Tittot and its artistry in working glass in a very poetical way.