Glass Works: Forming a Site of Material Experimentation

Abstract

Glass, as a medium, reflects the characteristics and concerns of architecture at large—a material at once tangible and highly technical yet endlessly inviting of abstraction and projections of meaning. Historically, innovations in glass construction have often advanced the architectural avant-garde, as architects everywhere ceaselessly pursued light, volume, air, and phenomenon. Though designers long fantasized over pure transparency, modern glazing technologies readily enable that feat, even rendering it banal while incurring unintended environmental costs. Today, the challenge with architectural glass is in its diminished specificity: This once precious substance now appears abundantly, even excessively, on buildings worldwide regardless of climatic conditions or cultural context—detached from places and their established crafts-based know-how. To promote more sensitive approaches to glass architecture, this thesis proposes the design of an educational campus (workshop, dormitory, gallery) nestled in the Moselle valley of eastern France—a significant site of historic and ongoing glass and crystal production—forming a laboratory for forward-thinking experimental construction where visitors can cultivate a newfound material literacy. Here, the hands-on production of glass will serve as both the architecture’s subject and means of construction. Leveraging longstanding artisanal patrimony and up-to-date scientific principles, this project encourages participatory fabrication of small-scale components and interrogates conventional glazing assemblies reliant on non-vitreous inclusions. The implications of such innovations extend beyond this speculative setting, offering socially and ecologically sustainable strategies for glass construction more broadly. Perennially poeticized for its capacities to reveal, illuminate, and magnify, glass matters, as ever, in progressing contemporary architecture.