Rolling in Transparency

Abstract

It has been only a few decades since glass has started revealing its full potential and emerged in the engineering world in three-dimensional repetitive cast glass units with the shape and size of typical masonry bricks. Cast glass stands as the most competitive and novel answer to the relentless eagerness for transparency in the built environment, expanding in this way the shape and size barriers imposed by float glass. At present, cast glass has already proved its dynamism in few realized projects since it is the foundation of three structural systems which employ cast glass units. The additional supportive substructure, the adhesively bonded units and the third which is still on research stage, the
interlocking cast glass elements. The aforementioned systems present great potentiality for more transparent structures, yet some of the technical aspects could be further developed. The present master thesis explores the potential of embedding connections in cast glass units as a fourth structural system, supplementary to the existent ones. This system stands as an attempt to address the intensive assembly, the compromised transparency or the irreversibility, some of the key difficulties that are introduced by the precedent systems.