The inspiration to meet the challenge of the demands of living adjacent to a heritage overlay property with the need to create a unique and contemporary family home in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of South Yarra came from Switzerland. The Ricola Factory building in Switzerland, which featured a printed image on corrugated fibreglass by architects Herzog and De Meuron, gave Melbourne design architect Anna Ely the inspiration to explore the same concept.
DMS DigiGlass is a safety glass which is created by bonding a polyvinyl butyral (PVB) interlayer between two sheets of grade A safety glass. DMS DigiGlass meets AS 2208 grade A safety glass standards, yet enables virtually any image — regardless of whether it is a design or photograph, with a solid colour or continuous tone, thick lines or thin — to be reproduced between two sheets of safety glass. Using digital imaging and ink jet printing technologies, the technology offers architects a creative expression in decorative safety glass.
For this project, images of leaves were printed onto a PVB interlayer. The interlayer was encapsulated by glass sheets. Each panel was then fixed to the entire façade of the home. A botanical image was chosen as an appropriate image to print on the glass as it alludes to the leafy streets of South Yarra and the design was created to blend in with the existing foliage.
The final image was a collage of small, closely packed green impatiens leaves with small segments of red. The digital image of the leaf pattern was then reproduced onto the DigiGlass interlayer in over 40 tiles. The end pattern was repeated on 1,200 mm by 1,200 mm modules, while the glass size of the tiles varied.
