The Epic of Glass: From a Grain of Sand to a Wall of Light

Glass begins as sand walked upon without notice until fire gives it a new birth, and this hymn from a series devoted to building materials follows it from the earth to the wall of light. It treats glass as the eye of the building, a material that can reveal, reflect or conceal, and traces how stained glass let light itself paint at Chartres and Sainte-Chapelle, how colored glass brought a moving rainbow into Damascene houses and their reception rooms, and how lenses carried sand to the stars in the telescope and into the invisible world of the microscope. Modern architecture follows with Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, Gropius's Bauhaus at Dessau, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Seagram Building, Philip Johnson's Glass House with its question of privacy, I. M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre, and towers that turn the city into its own mirror. The book is frank about glass and heat, climate, glare, breakage and birds, explains insulated, tempered, laminated, smart and photovoltaic glass, and argues for the window that opens, the filtering of the mashrabiya and a window that reveals only part of the view. It ends with a dialogue between glass and stone and a closing hymn in which glass, having passed through fire, calls itself a window to the sky and the eye of the building.