In the heartland of a modern metropolis, a building holding together elements of technology, art and human wisdom is legendarily standing upon us, which is the Victoria Industrial Revolution dream passing on to the ancient oriental country in the new information age.

The successful, splendid and memorable Shanghai World Expo in 2010 brought an idea to Shanghai Municipal People’s Government and International Exhibitions Bureau to co-build World Expo museum. As Shanghai “ the 12th Five-year Plan” project of significant cultural facilities, the museum covers an area of 4 hectares with the structure area of 46,550 m2.

In the theme of “ Expo memory & Urban life”, the museum was designed as “time container” for taking in flash moments and cheerful memories of all previous World Expos and to serve as interactive space for communicating public culture among visitors, presenting an urban living room for searching, feeling, creating and sharing the happiness of life.

The museum building exhibits the image superimposition of “historic river valley” symbolizing history trace, meditation & eternity and “joyous cloud” symbolizing future , openness & flashing moments. Irregular glass panels were considered to be used to construct the “joyous cloud”, which was the top concern of this whole project construction.

The overall outline of “Joyous Cloud” is concise and smooth, with three cloud columns twisting upwards from the bottom of the building, giving people a strong visual sense of “future”. In the middle of the building, the cloud columns gracefully unfold and keep linking up with each other to form a perfect curve on the top.

The architect adopted light-weight steel frame to support the whole “joyous cloud” structure, and applied triangle folding clear glass and enameled glass to reveal gradually varied façade texture. This design of“Joyous Cloud” with “ instant” concept makes it to become the center of the whole museum. Nearly 4000 panels of spotless glass with different shapes, colored glaze as well as thermal isolation performance are undoubtedly a new challenge of technology improvement for glass deep-processing industry, while NorthGlass is always ready to take this kind of challenging task.

Early during the construction of Expo “Sunny Valley”, the pavilion construction party had already been deeply impressed by those glass panels from NorthGlass. So when the “joyous cloud” was designed to use the glass with almost the same processing difficulty with that of “Sunny Valley”, the project party’s first thought was to reach out for help from NorthGlass.

The common between “Sunny Valley” and “Joyous Cloud” is that they are both the building representatives of Shanghai city symbolic culture architecture, the design patterns of which are focusing on the same conception that the designers want to express through this kind of highly recognizable architectural language. While the difference between them is the adoption of colored glaze process on the Low-E coated glass freely twisting upwards the façade of “Joyous Cloud”. Although this creative design of “Joyous Cloud” is splendid, it also asks for more precise shape calculation and stricter process control during the manufacturing of these irregular glass. Any shape fault in any glass will lead to graphic patter misalignment. For the façade of “Joyous Cloud” up to ten thousand square meters, totally 3982 panels of triangular glass are used, which gives an unprecedented challenge to the glass process availability and its economical efficiency as well as the assembling of the glass façade.

NorthGlass took this new glass project for the Expo museum and provided glass from its Shanghai production base, and finally handed over satisfying and perfect glass products. Today, this world-level cultural building in front of us is a new glass story written down by NorthGlass to be a shining one among those international buildings standing along Huangpu River.