Valuing vibrancy with The Vanceva® World of Color Awards™

OMA's Audrey Irmas Pavilion in LA, a hulking 55,000 sq ft punctured light box, and a hospital carpark in Copenhagen may seem like odd bedfellows. Both buildings, however, create a dramatic but carefully controlled aesthetic effect using light and coloured glass. And both have been rewarded for their efforts, taking the top prizes in Eastman's Vanceva® World of Color Awards™, a bi-annual celebration of bold and beautiful use of coloured glass in architecture, interiors and furniture.

OMA's pavilion, created to host cultural and religious events, scooped top honours in World of Color Awards™’s exterior category. The building, set next to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, smartly stacks gathering places of different size and shapes. The architects have used eight layers of green Vanceva® PVB interlayer, combined with metal mesh, throughout the building.

World of Color Awards™ juror Joe Jacoby, director of design at Utah-based Jacoby Architects, praised the Pavilion's ‘powerful pops of colour’ and its ‘light-coloured fractal facade’. ‘The simplicity of the green has such a big impact and meaningful connection to the existing green dome roof next door,’ Jacoby says. ‘They took a simple concept, and went big with it, while keeping the purity of the design.’

‘Laminated glass was not simply used to add colour,’ adds World of Color Awards™ juror Firas Hnoosh, managing director of Nordic Office Architects, ‘it was used as a painting and volumetric medium to colour the different recesses within the building and complement the composition.’

Artist Malene Nors Tardrup takes a radically different approach at the Bispebjerg Hospital Carpark. Her piece, A Long Time is Not Forever, which took World of Color Awards™’s interiors top prize, is a series of photo-collages printed on Vanceva® coloured windows on seven levels of the carpark's staircase. Remarkable inside and out, the collages, each a different colour, tell stories from the hospital's 100-year history. 

‘The installation introduces splashes of colour to an otherwise very utilitarian structure,’ says Monika Kumor, project designer at architects HOK and another World of Color Awards™ juror. ‘It plays with multiple materials to tell the story of the place and to introduce light, colour, and transparency in a very creative way. It gives a recognizable, strong, and uplifting wayfinding element in an environment that can be stressful and overwhelming for patients and their families.’

The Awards also give honourable mentions to a number of other projects, including the Cooke School in East Harlem in New York, which playfully uses Vanceva® interlayers in big angular bay windows, creating visual punch but also helping the school's special needs students navigate the site. 

Also picking up honours are the Spanish city of León – which marked the introduction of its high-speed underground rail line with the installation of 11 luminous skylights made of high-performance Vanceva® glass – and the Church of the Blessed Mary Restituta in Brno, Czechia, which tops a stark concrete circle with an 80 m Vanceva® glass rainbow. An honourable mention also went to The Mist Hot Spring Hotel in Xuchang, China. The resort features a double-skin shell of laminated magenta and blue Vanceva® interlayers set against serene, grey granite walls, both elegantly shrouded in steam from the hot springs. 

Vanceva® offers the largest system of PVB interlayer colours in the world with a palette that can be combined to create more than 17,000 transparent, translucent, or solid colours. And, it says, architects, designers and artists are getting ever more daring and inventive in their integration of coloured glass into new designs. ‘The number and scope of projects entered in this year’s World of Color Awards™ broke new records for the competition,’ says Priya Kalsi, global market segment manager with Eastman. ‘We are always inspired by the innovation we see as the entries come in. Vanceva® PVB interlayers are used to create landmark designs, special effects, wayfinding, and so many other things.’

Eastman will be celebrating all the World of Color Awards™ winners at an awards ceremony at Glasstec 2022 — Let’s Go Live! Tradeshow running September 20-23, 2022, in Düsseldorf, Germany.

© Architonic