VISION Issue 43 | Page 20

VISION 43 — THE BLOCK 2017 Glass is often considered as a one-type fits-all material when in reality there is a broad performance spectrum not always visible to the naked eye. Glass is a thing of beauty but it’s also highly transparent. You can easily take the glass enclosure for granted. What’s there is a highly technical piece of building fabric. It’s like anything else in a building that forms part of the composition and any one of those can be completely transparent and of course it’s no joke that glass is transparent but the idea that it’s there and the technology and the performance that it lends the building is second to none.