On September 28, 2015, witnessed by China’s first lady Peng Liyuan, Joseph W. Polisi, President of The Juilliard School, announced “The Tianjin Juilliard School”, marking a new milestone in Juilliard’s all-round expansion in Asia. On June 2017, The Tianjin Juilliard School broke ground and is expected to be completed this summer.
Founded in 1905, The Juilliard School is one of the world’s top professional music schools, known as “Harvard of music”. Since its founding in 1905, Julliard’s alumni have won more than 100 Grammy Awards, Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, Bessie Awards, Academy Awards, Pulitzer Awards and dozens of National Medal of Art Awards.
The Tianjin Juilliard School is the first overseas campus of The Juilliard School, and also the first performing arts institution in China to offer a U.S. accredited Master of Music degree.
The building of The Tianjin Juilliard School was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who cooperated with Juilliard during the renovations of Juilliard’s New York City campus. The main building of the school is a teaching building with 8 floors, 2 floors underground and 6 floors above the ground. The school integrates acoustic technology and architectural art to create a very modern architectural form.
The Tianjin Juilliard School project includes odeum, concert hall, black box theatre, library and corridor. The flexible spatial layout breaks the boundaries between performers and audiences. In the centre of the building, a glass roof straddles the overpass, creating an open lobby that is perfectly connected to the surrounding park.
The buildings of The Tianjin Juilliard School are all irregular polyhedral shapes. Such a unique architectural appearance also puts forward high requirements for the processing and installation of curtain wall glass. In addition, the solution of environmental sound quality is the core problem. The acoustic design is specific to the functional layout, spatial form, decoration structure and partial treatment, each interface of the building undertakes double functions of art and acoustics. The allowable indoor noise of the project shall be controlled below 15 decibels, while the highest standard of similar buildings in China is generally around 20 decibels.
Due to the excellent performance and high-quality appearance of the samples and the popularity of NorthGlass in the glass curtain wall industry, the owner and the designer entrusted this significant architectural glass manufacturing task to Tianjin NorthGlass after on-site sampling and sifting.
This project is equipped with five-glass two-cavity double-laminated ultra-clear high-performance energy-saving glass, which is difficult to process and the manufacturing technique is complicated. After careful pre-production planning, strict control in the production process and the inspection of each piece of finished glass, NorthGlass takes the “zero defect” glass finishing level as the target, and strictly controls the tempered wave and stress pattern. Under dynamic observation, the internal control wave deformation is controlled within 0.08mm.
The glass products not only meet the high requirements of customers, but also enhance the special status of The Tianjin Juilliard School in national politics.
The construction of the whole project is constantly integrated with the innovative elements and the strict requirements of the owner. The complex architectural appearance makes the design concept of The Tianjin Juilliard School go beyond the drawings, from dream to reality. With the spirit of craftsman and the high-quality production mode of glass processing, Tianjin NorthGlass has made the glass curtain wall of The Tianjin Juilliard School into another case of high-quality glass curtain wall. In the future, the school will become the cultural hub of Tianjin, China and even the whole Asia, and contribute to the economic development of Tianjin.