I Have Never Really Given Much Thought To Glass,

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!