Architectural Glass Design and Installation - Reflecting on Glass

The world of glass offers infinite variations of kind and quality for designers and consumers depending on the situation. Over the history of glass work, the options have expanded from mainly commercial to include residential glass design and highly specialized glass repair companies, as well as increasingly study architectural glass. A brief history of the craft is useful for gaining perspective on just how far we’ve come.

Today, architectural glass is most often used in building materials for large-scale projects such as external window walls and internal transparent glazing on the building envelope. The earliest form of architectural glass did not resemble the versatile brands we’re surrounded with, though. Rome’s oldest buildings offer us a glimpse of what the art looked like starting off with its remnants of cast glass windows found in upper class villas and places of importance, still bearing many optical impurities that had yet to be removed during production.

Residential glass design continued to evolve with the development of the crown glass production method, which consisted of rapidly spinning hot, blown glass and using centrifugal force to create a flat sheet that could then be trimmed to the desired shape. Residential glass during this era often took the form diaper lattice glass, because the diamond shape was easily crafted from the flat crown glass sheet.

During these early stages, the production of glass was still a very costly process, and a glass repair company would have been no different from a glass making company in terms of price. As rolled plate glass and float glass developed, though, the thought of a glass repair company seemed increasingly logical. People no longer had to commission all new creations in response to a nick or chip, and today we enjoy the most affordable glass history has ever seen.