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La Cité du Vin is a new cultural and exhibition center in Bordeaux focusing on wine, especially the history and culture around its production.
Located near the Garonne river, the new building is an urban landmark with its curved shapes and color palette. It also offers an excellent viewpoint for the city and surrounding landscape.
The design by XTU Architects focused on creating an experience able, through form and dynamism, to suggest the idea of a continuous sense of movement. It is a place that recalls the liquidity of wine and the river that flows gently by and an iconic construction to explore on a journey of experience and learning. The distribution of space revolves around a large central staircase that leads visitors upwards from the bottom - where dark colors evoke roots deep in the earth - to the top - where light floods in from above. After learning about wine from the displays and multimedia presentations, visitors can revel in the view from 55 m up on the panoramic viewpoint, with the 360° view of the cityscape and vineyards.
Seen from outside, La Cité du Vin stands out both for its soft, curved structure and for the use of colors, which change with the weather and the time of the day.
Above the base of the building, clad in gilded metal panels, rises the main tower, which is completely glazed (2,700 sq m). The double-skin façade has about 900 panels on the outer side in Guardian UltraClear™ and Guardian Sunguard® Solar Gold 20 glass, both flat and curved, with sections printed in 20 different patterns. These are placed to alternate see-through sections with golden stripes in a design that embraces the envelope and creates a sense of dynamism.
The Guardian UltraClear™ glass panels provide superb light transmission, allowing the sunlight to expand the sense of space and lightness, and removing the color distortion typical of traditional glass. The triple panels with a gilded coating, Sunguard® Solar Gold 20, are created by coating Guardian ExtraClear® glass, to provide solar control and superb color rending of the gilded effect.
Guardian Europe
19 rue du Puits Romain - L - 8070 Bertrange
Tel. +352 281111
E-mail: [email protected] - www.sunguardglass.com
