OK you drink out of it,
and look through it when watching television or driving your
car, but it appears 'these days these days glass isn't just glass' as said Peter Weismantle, the director of supertall technology at Adrian Smith + Gordon GillArchitecture, which designed the 3,280-foot Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia, the manufacture of glass was once limited to just a few meters wide,
but nowadays glass can be produced on a molten bed of tin up to several meters
wide, appropriately enough called float glass, but there are problems using glass in super tall buildings, wind and
sunlight, once you start going high the wind can push a window in and on the
other side of the building building strangely enough exert even more force trying
to suck a window out, another unseen force also plays havoc with tall
buildings, heat, in the form of sunlight, even in winter air conditioning has
to be used, it is a fact that air conditioning is a skyscraper’s single biggest
energy expense, so along comes celebratory glass and this is how it is made,
the raw, or annealed, glass is placed in an oven and then rapidly cooled, a
process called heat strengthening, after which manufacturers or fabricators
apply layers of metal coatings to achieve various performance qualities, such
coatings are applied in nanometre-thick layers, as thin as a one-thousandth of
a human hair, often several on top of each other in a custom “recipe” designed
to meet a building’s unique needs, for example, a client might want a glass
that allows in maximum light but minimum heat, finally, for supertalls, the
glass pieces will be cut and either laminated together or configured with a
fraction of an inch of air between them, known as double glazing (for maximum
strength, many supertall towers require triple glazing, with a laminated pair
of glass panes and another thinner, single pane), the result is a high-tech
glass barrier that can be almost an inch thick: strong enough to withstand
hurricane-force winds and reflect all but a fraction of heat from the sun, yet
flawlessly clear enough to appear invisible, back to life on ground level, my kind of glass, make
mine a double!
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