STRUCTURAL GLASS FACADES - USC School of Architecture

of structural glass facades where larger budgets are confined to lobby and public area
facades.
Another example is suspended glass facades, first developed by the French in the mid 20 th
century, and only made possible by their earlier invention of heat-strengthening processes
for glass. The Hahn system referred to earlier was used in the 1950’s by Henri Bernard in
the Maison de la Radio in Paris. This led to a number of systems introduced by both industry
producers and designers, and a number of built façade structures in the 1960’s and 1970’s
that established suspended, fin-supported glass walls as a viable façade technology. Finsupported
glass facades thus initiated the evolution of structural glass façade technology as
characterized in this thesis, and are to this day perhaps the most commonly found type of
high-transparency façade.
The success of glass technology can be attributed at least in part to the persistence of a
client base willing to pay a premium for innovative designs using the very latest the
technology has to offer. The newest structural glass façade technology employs cable net
supporting structures. A review of the high-profile applications, as exemplified by recent
buildings completed in New York City, the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle by
SOM, the Freedom Tower and 7 World Trade Center with David Childs, SOM, and glass
specialist designer James Carpenter, reveals this premium technology integrated as feature
elements in the most public areas of the architecture.
As these high-profile projects are completed they typically generate some significant media
coverage, both in local and professional media sources. The growing interest in and demand
for cable net structures is typically reflected in one of the many articles to feature the cable
net wall at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan (Kenter 2007, p.2), “Sylvie Boulanger,
executive director, Quebec Region of the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction, says
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