Architectural Glass

Abstract

Recent decades have seen growing and widespread adoption of glass as an architectural material that can be used not only as window panes but also as facades, walls, and roofs. This is despite glass traditionally being considered a brittle material, not readily capable of handling the high loads required of architectural materials. Architectural glass has enabled the vaulted, transparent structures of many modern airport terminals and eye-catching buildings, such as the ubiquitous all-glass Apple Stores found around the world. Glass has enabled architects to expand their visions of buildings, using light and space to create wonderful new designs. As described in this review, these dramatic new possibilities for how glass is used in architecture have been the result of a convergence of many developments, including a better understanding of the fracture of glass, new processes for strengthening glass, confidence in large-scale finite element modeling of gravitational and wind loads, advances in the lamination of glass sheets, and the availability of ever larger individual sheets of float glass. The concurrent evolution of standards for the use of glass in buildings has also played a role in advancing the use of architectural glass. Advances in the architectural use of glass have their roots in the traditional uses and physical understanding of the properties of glass that have developed over hundreds of years.