Building with Glass

steven Van
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Look out to the skyline of any major city in the world, you’ll see skyscrapers clad in glass. Despite being such a dominant feature of a city’s appearance, glass buildings and skyscrapers are a relatively new concept in architecture. Although glass has always been a valuable commodity for most of history, producing enough glass to cover an entire building was virtually impossible until the world started to industrialise in the 19th century.

One of the earliest attempts at this is Hardwick Hall, built in the 1590s for an Elizabethan noble. The front of the building is covered in huge panes of glass, when glass was still a luxury item. Nevertheless, it’s still a fairly traditionally designed building by modern standards, with a stone framework keeping the whole thing together as old glass cannot withstand the weight and pressure applied on it like modern glass can.

With the industrialisation of the western world in the 19th century comes the rise of new architectural materials such as steel, iron and cast glass allowed for new and innovative designs in architecture. One of the first buildings produced mainly with glass is the Crystal Palace in London, utilising the brand-new cast plate glass method to produce cheap sheets of glass that have superb structural properties. The Crystal Palace held the Great Exhibition of 1851, which showed off the various products of the world in what was the most technologically advanced nation in the world. The Crystal Palace went from planning to completion in only 9 months.

From here, building with metal and glass became the new vogue in construction of tall buildings, as they were no longer reliant on heavy stone walls for structural support. Buildings such as the Louvre Pyramid, One World Trade Center and the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa are all made with these methods. For those looking for new windows, doors, greenhouses and orangeries Darlington, Prime Aspect Windows produces all of these with a quality unparalleled in the North East.

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