Objectives

Our goal at the Telfair Museum was to design a completely custom skylight with dramatically oversized laminated lites with minimally sized fittings—and make the skylight a design signature at the entrance of the museum.

Approach

Intensive engineering was applied to support the extra-large lites of glass using minimally sized patch fittings. The skylight required specialty glass fabrication: largest glass lites measured up to 81-square-feet and weighed in excess of 1,000 pounds. The system includes two cable-supported, suspended skylights held in place by a custom-designed edge-clamp system. These pressure fittings were custom designed to accommodate interior lighting requirements. The skylight is hung from a louvered canopy above,to reduce the sightlines of the supporting structure.

Results

The result is an extremely dramatic skylight that defies the typical ratios of glass size to structure. It extends the architectural vision of Moshe Safdie’s Telfair Museum upward and outward.

Location

Savannah, GA

Architect

Safdie Architects, Somerville, MA

Products Used

Structural Glass Skylight