Curved and Large Format Insulating Glass in Architectural Applications

To produce insulating glass that meets today's rising demands for thermal insulation, aesthetics and transparency, the traditional way of producing such insulating glass becomes more and more difficult if not impossible, as more and more large formats and complex curved insulating glass is being requested. Standard insulating glass production lines are not designed to handle insulating glass in complete sheet sizes of 6.3 × 3.21 m. Yet, the requirements of designers and constructions that want to fulfil the rising demand for maximum transparency and higher needs for thermal insulation even request glass sheet sizes of sometimes more than 15 m to give architectural projects the openness and the least frame and seal interruptions that are possible. Larger glass sizes also means thicker glass. As it is impossible to process curved glass fully automatically, and even more out of scope to process this to insulating glass, this has to be done in manual assembly operation and with a lot of hands on experience. The larger the glass panes become, the more difficult it gets to find appropriate automatic processing machinery that can handle these large sheets. But even more one wants at least the highest possible machine support on large format plane or flat insulating glass. This is now possible. For both applications, large format insulating glass and curved insulating glass that also can become fairly large and heavy, there are now edge seal systems in place and proven in both artificial aging and in real service life experience available. This even make the production of complex and unordinary insulating glass easy. These insulating glass systems define new borders of sizes and design. A number of actual and recent projects in the presentation show what is possible and lead the way to further stress the borders of the possibilities in architectural design.