Should the glass surface be perfectly flat and straight? Not in modern architecture! Today, architects and designers create facades and interior decor of amazing beauty, making glass bend in waves and form the most bizarre shapes. They achieve the feeling that glass is not hard and brittle, but soft and pliable in nature.
A very clear example is the glass façade of the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg, Germany, with Guardian Glass used for the façade. Today, the building's façade is considered one of the most complex in the world, combining flat and curved double-glazed windows, as well as curved triple laminated glass.
How is curved glass made?
There are two ways to give glass a special, curved shape: gravitational bending and thermal bending in the process of hardening or heat-strengthening. In the first case, glass heated above the softening temperature is placed on top of the mold or inside it and slowly cooled after reaching the desired shape. This allows you to give the glass almost any of the possible shapes, but the process takes several hours. In this case, the coating on the glass must be resistant to prolonged heating.
The bending process during hardening is much faster. The glass is instantly cooled immediately after reaching the desired curvature, and this increases its strength. However, in this case, the choice of possible shapes is limited to curved and concave options.
Without compromising energy efficiency
Curved glass, as mentioned above, gives architects and designers more creative freedom. It allows you to emphasize straight lines with smooth curves, to give transparency even to the corner sections of buildings. But should we sacrifice for the sake of aesthetics the principles of energy efficiency and the comfort of people inside the building? Fortunately, no!
The Guardian SunGuard® glass series withstands bending while retaining its thermal and solar control characteristics without losing its visual appeal. They will decorate the facade of any shopping or business center or residential building and will create the effect of complete "uniformity" of curved and flat parts of the facade.
You just need to come up with the most daring and unusual facade, well, experts from the technical department of the Guardian company will be happy to help with advice and calculations - at every stage of making your daring dream come true.
