An eye-catching mass of concrete and glass resembling an 'oversized snowball' is currently under construction on the outside of a new restaurant at the Kirow Factory in Leipzig, Germany. The structure, 12m in diameter, is one of the last designs of the celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, designed prior to his death in 2012. The architects executing the design of 'the Niemeyer sphere', as it has been dubbed, needed special glass to reduce solar glare from its 147 windows. Niemeyer's right-hand man, Jair Valera, and German architect Harald Kern decided to use a new type of 'dynamic' glass known as Eyrise® Dynamic Liquid Crystal Windows, that has been designed to modulate light and shade.
展开▼
