Mankind and Architecture
No other material fires the imagination of architects quite as much as glass. Michael Wigginton describes the history of a material, whose architectural potential is a long way from being exhausted.
Over about the last 3500 years, glass has gone from being a luxury product to a universal one. People have always been fascinated by it. Michael Wigginton, Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Plymouth refers to the first glass pearls, which originated from Egypt and Mesopotamia, used in the Roman art of glass blowing and the discovery of the material for architectural use. Wigginton makes a distinction between five “glass ages”: the Gothic Age, the time of the large conservatories in the 19th Century, the Early Modern Age, the “High-Tech” buildings of the 1980s and 1990s and the present trend for multi-purpose, intelligent building wrappers made of glass. Technology and aesthetics can never be mutually exclusive.
Michael Wigginton: “The potential richness of the multi functional intelligent skin, responding moment by moment, and season by season to the vagaries of climate and the needs of the occupants has the potential to give us the transient beauty of the butterfly's wing.”
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