Essay: Current Glass Facades: Technically Demanding, Fascinating in Design

摘要

Glass is a fascinating building material with diverse, sometimes even contrary characteristics. It can be transparent, reflective or display a translucent satin finish. It is extremely hard and at the same time breakable. From a technical perspective, this brittle material has gone through an incredible development in just a few decades, considering its capacity to assume load-bearing functions in bold structures or to contribute to climate control by means of sophisticated, virtually invisible coatings. Yet the building material has another side to it, an inherent or material side as it were. This includes its ability to refract or reflect light, to filter or bring color to architecture through printing, inserted foils or pigments. As the most important transparent material by far, glass has become an essential component of architecture. After all,a modern building envelope without a fair proportion of the material is hard to find nowadays.