Vitro Architectural Glass

Jewel Changi Airport, Singapore
Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

Singapore's Jeweled Dome

Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport, designed by Safdie Architects, is a spectacular multi-faceted glass dome covering 1.7 million sq. ft. of terraced gardens, retail and restaurant space, lodging, terminal operations with the world’s tallest indoor waterfall and a suspended glass-bottomed bridge. Incorporating more than 550,000 sq. ft. of Vitro’s Solarban 70 glass, the glazing not only lights up the terminal, but supports the indoor plant life, and offers good acoustics at one of the world’s busiest airports. More than 9,000 triangles of the double-glazed glass were fabricated, with no more than two units shaped in the same way. A 16-mm air space between the two panels

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Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

True Color

Described as an affordable complement to Vitro’s Starphire Ultra-Clear glass, the new Acuity low-iron glass offers a transparent, neutral and crisper view with a greater fidelity than regular clear glass. Compatible with Vitro’s suite of Solarban glazing, Acuity is also available in 6-mm. thickness for monolithic spandrel glass applications where true-color rendition is necessary, or to be paired with a low-E coated lite in an insulating glass unit.

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Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

Sawtooth Shading

The 55-story 181 Fremont high-rise features a distinct sawtooth patterned façade which dictates that window mullions in the curtainwall angle slightly in against one another, essentially functioning as a shading device. Vitro’s triple-silver-coated Solarban 70XL glass blocks 70% of the sun’s heat energy while enabling 65% of the ambient daylight to pass through.

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Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

Amazon's Geodesic Spheres

NBBJ selected Vitro’s Solarban 60 and Starphire Ultra-Clear glass for their clarity and ability to facilitate photosynthesis. In fact, low-iron glass and a specific low-E coating—that allowed for 480 nanometers of light to come in while rejecting heat—was carefully chosen to promote plant growth for the more than 40,000 plants in the greenhouse.

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Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

Treehouse Glazing

For Mexico’s library at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Sasaki Associates’ endeavored to create a treehouse in the middle of the campus forest. The floor-to-ceiling windows, fabricated with Solarban 90 Vitro glass, deliver a light-to-solar gain ratio of 2.22 and a corresponding reduction in demand for artificial lighting and AC.

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Advances
Glass & Curtainwall

Canopy of Glass Connects

World-renowned artist Spencer Finch designed an architectural canopy to connect two new office buildings at the center of Amazon’s expanded headquarters campus in Seattle. A walk through local woods inspired Finch’s “There is Another Sky,” his recreation of the dynamic patterns of light and shapes that form when light filters through foliage. The stylized canopy addsa creative, artistic element to the classic canopy design and reflects the local culture, all while providing an open, welcoming feeling in an urban setting. Finch developed the pattern with five hues and five opacities to control and vary the amount of light that filters through the decorative canopy, whi

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Advances
Decorative Glass

Old and New

Chicago O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 5 was designed more than 20 years ago, so when it recently underwent a renovation and expansion, architects Epstein Global specified Starphire Ultra-Clear glass by Vitro Architectural Glass to enhance the existing architecture and continue it through the expansion. A two-story interior curtainwall serves as a partition separating secured and non-secured areas of the terminal. The glass panels line up against one another and create a continuous image that shows the gradual changes in color and texture that can be seen when heading inland from Lake Michigan to Chicago and on to Illinois’ rural cornfields.

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