Page 60 - Between light and shade

between light and shade, TRANSPARENCy and reflection

From its first to its eighth floor, the “lantern”
contains four large conference rooms, each
surrounded by two tiers of interpreters booths
accessed via eight levels of adjacent corridors.
On the ground floor, and on the ninth and
tenth floors, a cafeteria and restaurants provide
a view of the outside world. Finally, a curved
fire escape staircase, serving all floors, stands
the entire height of the “lantern”. The envelope
requires a degree of transparency at the top and
bottom for the view, and a degree of opacity
around passageways and corridors to ensure
privacy. This combination is achieved by using
screen-printed panes of glass with varying levels
of transparency between 33 and 75% 56.

The pattern reproduced on the panes must
render their basic division visible and, therefore,
the succession of sizes 57, but also, like an illusio-

Council of the European Union”), in Bulletin de la Classe des
Beaux-Arts, Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des
Arts de Belgique, 6th series, v. XVII, 2006, 7/12, pp. 323-353.
See also Jean Attali and Philippe Samyn, op. cit., pp. 67-92.
It was in 2003, for the first time, that I proposed using old
recycled oak frames for the double facade of a day nursery in
Watermael-Boitsfort (01/459).
56 Each quarter of the 42 elements, made from segments of ellip-
tical cones forming the envelope, comprises 14 trapezoidal
curved panes of glass with curved horizontal edges, equalling
a total of 588 panes with different dimensions and degrees
of transparency (see also Jean Attali and Philippe Samyn,
op. cit., pp 109 to 158).
57 Dom Hans van der Laan (1904-1991): Le nombre plastique,

quinze leçons sur l’ordonnance architechtonique (The plastic

60