A new modern architecture stands in the intersection of Shanghai Lingshi Road and Pingxingguan Road, it simple but elegant, hard and soft, gray wall wrapped with transparent glass curtain wall, which builds the internal public space externalized extension, this is a “city window” built by Shanghai NorthGlass ——Jing’an archives and community culture center (hereinafter referred to as: Jing’ an archives).
The “city window" conveys the rich and colorful public activities inside the building to the city. Therefore, the permeability of the interface is an important guarantee of the public quality. Jing’an Archives adopts the ultra-high transparent Low-E glass curtain wall specially made by Shanghai NorthGlass, which has excellent lighting effect and maximizes the reduction of additional components to ensure the integrity of the building. Through the adjustment of glass parameters to achieve the energy saving requirements, effectively reduce the operation and maintenance cost of tall space shading components.
The glass curtain wall system is equipped with more than 140 multi-layer super white glass ribs, the longest is more than 12 meters, a piece of glass needs more than 20 holes to match the panel installation and embeds metal casing. In the processing process of glass, it is extremely difficult to ensure the concentricity of the hole after multi-layer glass superposition. Shanghai NorthGlass adopts special process to research and develop special tooling equipment to complete the production task with high standard.
The south side of the project facing the street is a high-rise residential area. The requirement on glass reflectivity rate is extremely strict to meet the light environment evaluation standards, which becomes another challenge for the use of glass curtain wall. The glass curtain wall in south side is tilted outward for 4° to improve the reflectivity of the panel glass and ensure the permeability, which also fits the morphological characteristics of the oblique lines of the building from the vertical direction. Therefore, this project has become a very few projects in Shanghai using the super-large-span inclined glass rib curtain wall system in the high-rise buildings, providing a new idea for shaping the public buildings with high permeability requirements in the light-sensitive areas.
In order to hide the huge metal fixture about 0.5m high on the glass rib top and the bottom plate in the structure and ceiling space, all the plate edges involving the glass curtain wall are partially lowered, and the grooves generated are used to integrate lighting, drainage, air conditioning system, etc.
The external form of the building obtains a personalized characteristic because of the “extreme presentation” of the communality. The Shanghai Jing’an Archives has broken the boundary of the use of public space, and the space is no longer defined by a simple function, but it is derived into a more flexible and open social communication container.
Nowadays, the construction of public space in urban buildings in Shanghai has reached a new stage, and the shaping of public space pays more attention to the public use and space construction, which provides a model for the shaping of innovative buildings.
With the completion of the project, NorthGlass has been highly evaluated by the owners and users, which is undoubtedly the affirmation and praise of our ingenuity spirit. But for NorthGlass, the greater praise comes from exploring ways of architectural design and changing people’s thinking and living habits to help architects achieve their desired goals. This is what NorthGlass can do and aspire to do to realize the ideal of the builders and make the city more beautiful.