Glass in Modern and Contemporary Architecture

Glass is paradoxical. Glass is prized for its permeability to light. Its material qualities of reflection and refraction that gift it the spectacular quality of being seen to not only transmit light but contain it, enabling the splendor of the chandelier and the dizzying nightscapes of the city. Although visually light, it is as dense as concrete. Glass is simultaneously valued for its imperviousness and inertness, making it a valued container, particularly for perfumes and chemicals. Despite its density and hardness, it is painfully fragile, requiring careful handling. Into the seventeenth century, the secrets of glassmaking were closely guarded, protected even to the death by Venetian glassmakers. It was a luxury and taxed as such, with Britain’s Window Tax introduced in 1696 and not lifted until 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. France’s Door and Window Tax was not rescinded until 1917, amidst the Great War. Glass is thus more than a material; it is an ideal. Glass is central to the relationship between our bodies and environments. Because it can transmit energy flows, glass holds the promise of a programmable, ecological material, which might enable us to restore a sense of balance with the world (despite the energy required for its production). Its relationship to optics and lenses links it with rationality and the Enlightenment. Through its inertness, glass exudes hygiene. As the chief intermediary between our bodies and the natural world, glass radiates our ideal of health. Transparency has itself become an ideal whether in the operations of the state or corporation, or the conduct of an individual: lucid expressions, clear thoughts, illuminated society. At the same time, as any Gothic cathedral reveals, glass’s visual immateriality lends it a magical, mystical dimension. Successive changes in production have transformed glass into a commodity, ever larger, cheaper, and more programmable. When the Crystal Palace was constructed in 1851, it was comprised of nearly 300,000 panes, mouthblown by skilled and specialized artisans. Successive waves of reconceptualizing glassmaking in the twentieth century increased sheet sizes and lowered costs—from the Lubbers process of mechanized cylinder glass to the Colburn and Fourcault processes of drawn sheet to the Pilkington process of float glass. In the early twenty-first century, glass production is dominated by multinational companies with annual sales worth more than one hundred billion dollars. We have come to expect a great deal of the material. We expect it to connect us with our surroundings, yet also to protect and define our inner world. The choices facing early-21st-century architects regarding glass selection range from light transmission, to heat absorption, to sound transmission, to shock resistance, to load-bearing capacity. These variations, which may employ altered chemistry, surface treatments, and laminations, each strive to realize our changing notions of the ideal ambience. For all of these reasons, Michael Wigginton perhaps put it best when he wrote that glass is an impossible material. Glass is a dream.