ARCHITECTURE SURVEYS

Engineered Transparency
Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering
59 minutes, color

Filmed at an international conference of prominent architects and engineers at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture in September 2007.

After its role in the last century's call to a radical new architecture and urban life, glass architecture is today more ubiquitous than ever. A highly engineered product, glass has emerged in a new light as an apparently culturally accepted material in design and construction. Its new incarnation, however, reveals a virtually new product replacing the glass used even twenty years ago. The innovations are observable and have direct use. Offering new modes of visual pleasure and spatial experience to building occupants - glass has also been the beneficiary of major advances in engineering that are decidedly less visible - structural innovations, new control and design engineering at the level of optics, thermal properties, and expanded fabrication limits as well as installation methods have quietly reconfigured the extent and reach of glass applications. We are so continually surrounded by such discreetly functioning glass that we do not even see it.



4 photos courtesy of Columbia University GSAPP
and the participants of the conference

The participants of the conference:

Kazuyo Sejima
Mark Wigley
Michael Bell
Bernhard Weller
Roberto Bicchiarelli
Laurie Hawkinson
Reinhold Martin
Detlef Mertins
Kenneth Frampton
James Carpenter
Guy Nordenson
François Roche
Hans Schober

Antoine Picon
Beatriz Colomina
Elizabeth Diller
Matthias Schuler
Stephen Holl
Werner Sobek
Ulrich Knaack
Nina Rappaport
Jens Schneider
Michelle Addington
Richard Tomasetti
Joan Ockman

Robert Heintges
Wilfried Laufs
Toshihiro Oki
Scott Marble
Graham Dodd
Susanne Rexroth
Thomas Richardson
Stefan Röschert
Albrecht Burmeister
H. Scott Norville
Matthew Kmet
Robert Smilowitz