Always in search of new and more efficacious forms of dialogue with the world of design, last June in fact the leading company on the glass block market launched a calendar of meetings open to the public with some of the most significant interpreters of contemporary architecture: this offers a precious opportunity to get in contact with some of the world’s greatest designers as well as with today’s up-and-coming studios, and to perceive the key line with which each interprets elements of great fascination in architecture such as transparency.

 

While the first event hosted Belén Moneo and Jeff Brock, the owners of the studio of the same name founded in New York in 1993 now based in Madrid, the attention now returns to Italy with a lecture by 5+1AA, the architecture studio founded in Genoa in 1995 by Alfonso Femia and Gianluca Peluffo, with other offices in Milan and Paris and with design proposals and architecture jobs coming from all over Europe.

 

Among the numerous projects the studio is currently handling, two stand out on account of their particular relationship between architecture and transparency: the Horizontal Tower at Fiera Milano Rho and the enlargement of the IULM in Milan, which use the new Q30 Diamante glass block, designed by 5+1AA and made by Seves glassblock as part of the Tailor Made service offered to architects.

 

In the Horizontal Tower project, the building that will house the management of Sviluppo Sistema Fiera a Milano, approx. 1,700 glass blocks have been used for the north-west closing wall of the double height volume of the meeting room, located in the intermediate terrace between the 5th and 6th floors. This transparent volume, a kind of void mid-building, is like an environment suspended between the city and the territory and conveys a sense of spatial lightness and magic: the three-dimensionality of the glass blocks allows the light to be filtered and reflected in a changing manner, accentuating this effect of suspension.

 

In the project for the enlargement of the IULM, approx. 17,500 Q30 Diamante blocks have been used around all the university’s distribution routes and in the 11-storey tower that will house the digital library. The decision to use glass blocks is associated with the need to work with both total transparency and the weight of the existing volumes and their capacity to create shadows and reverberations.

 

Result of a sensual dialogue between the designers and the material, Q30 Diamante has been sought out by 5+1AA as a new possibility to be able to organise variations on the themes that often return in their projects, above all the interaction with natural light and night-time metamorphosis, the interior-exterior relationship and the search for Beauty as dialogue and astonishment.

 

Source: GlassOnWeb