Copious amounts of glazing can be problematic, especially when it is used to enclose spaces where the quality of sound is paramount. But with the help of acousticians, architects are demonstrating that the benefits of glass, such as a glittering building skin, daylighting, and views, need not come at the expense of intelligibility of speech or the clarity of music. A trio of current projects—an intimate theater at the University of Virginia by William Rawn, an auditorium inside Frank Gehry’s sculptural Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and a renovation by Johnson Fain of Philip Johnson’s legendary Crystal Cathedral, near Los Angeles—reveal that design teams can successfully incorporate generous quantities of glass into acoustically sensitive spaces. These projects do so by combining glazing with other elements to reflect, scatter, or absorb sound and by exploiting the material’s own physical properties."

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Photo © Iwan Baan; Fondation Louis Vuitton Auditorium

	Ruth Caplin Theatre, University of Virginia William Rawn Associates Photo © Robert Benson
	Fondation Louis Vuitton Auditorium Gehry Partners Photo © Iwan Baan
	Crystal Cathedral Renovation Johnson Fain Image courtesy Johnson Fain