Engineered Transparency: Glass in Architecture and Engineering

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 discretely functioning glass that we do not even see it. This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes.

— Michael Bell, Professor, Chair,
Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials