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A Glass Wall or a Wall of Glasses? Tre Bicchieri Restaurant Sports a Seemingly Fragile Facade

A Glass Wall or a Wall of Glasses? Tre Bicchieri Restaurant Sports a Seemingly Fragile Facade

The newly-erected Glass Wall at São Paulo–based fine dining establishment Tre Bicchieri is one of those why-didn’t-someone-think-of-this-before feats of artistry.

A wall of glass in the most literal sense, the new facade fronting the Italian eatery is composed of 950 wine glasses stacked bowl-to-bowl and stem-to-stem. Parisian luxury architecture firm Carbondale, responsible for luxury brand showrooms across Europe and Asia including BMW, Louis Vuitton, and Longchamp, commissioned craftsmen in Murano, Italy, a region revered for its glass-making, to create three types of hand-blown wine glasses based on the facial profiles of the restaurant’s three proprietors.

Being handmade, each glass differs slightly from the others. Carbondale then enlisted a Brazilian glass specialist to attach each glass using invisible ultraviolet glue.

While Glass Wall appears unnervingly prone to disaster in photos, as if an errant elbow could send it crashing down, the columns of glasses are actually mounted on ultra-clear glass shelves sandwiched in an airtight space between two layers of facade glass, so it’s less of a house of cards than it looks.

The glasses glow with the illumination of LED lights integrated into the frame, which is equipped with sensors that adjust light intensity according to vacillations in natural light. At once an art piece and a veil of privacy for diners from passersby, Glass Wall strikes a balance between translucency and opacity.

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