Architecture is, in many ways, the art of controlling light — and no material has given architects more control over light than glass. The story of glass in buildings runs from the heated bathhouses of ancient Rome to the weightless transparency of the Louvre Pyramid, and it is a story still being written in the research labs and design studios of the 21st century.
The Roman Bath: Glass Enters Architecture (~AD 65–300)
The earliest known architectural use of glass was in the windows of Roman bath buildings (thermae) and villas, dating to approximately the 1st century AD. Archaeological excavations at Pompeii (preserved by the Vesuvius eruption of AD 79) have recovered small, thick, greenish window panes — typically cast rather than blown — from several structures. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, writing in his Naturalis Historia (AD 77), describes transparent windows as a significant luxury.
These early windows were small by necessity — Roman glass-making technology could not produce large flat panes — but their use in bathhouses was functionally motivated: glass admitted daylight while retaining the steam and warmth essential to the bathing experience. In this sense, the first architectural glass was installed in a room designed to be wet — a connection to the shower doors we install today that is more than coincidental.
Gothic Cathedrals: Glass as Theology (12th–15th Century)
The Gothic architectural revolution of 12th-century France was made possible by the pointed arch and the flying buttress — structural innovations that transferred the lateral thrust of the vault outside the building wall, allowing the walls themselves to be opened up with vast window openings. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, widely considered the father of Gothic architecture, explicitly theorized that colored light filtering through stained glass was a means of elevating the human soul toward the divine — a concept he called lux nova (new light).
The technical achievement was remarkable: Gothic craftsmen were melting small pieces of colored glass into iron armatures (lead came), assembling mosaic images of astonishing complexity and scale. The west rose window of Notre-Dame de Paris, installed around 1220 AD and miraculously surviving the 2019 fire (though damaged), measures 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter and contains hundreds of individual glass pieces. The entire structural analysis of the supporting masonry was done by intuition and accumulated craft knowledge — there were no structural engineering calculations in the modern sense.
The Crystal Palace: Industrial Glass Comes of Age (1851)
The Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Hyde Park, was the first building that could genuinely be described as made of glass. A prefabricated iron and glass structure covering 92,000 square meters, it was assembled in just 17 weeks using 83,612 square meters of sheet glass — more glass than had ever been used in a single building before or since, at the time. Paxton, originally a gardener who had designed glass greenhouses, simply scaled up the greenhouse principle to an unprecedented size.
The building demonstrated two things that changed architecture permanently: first, that glass and iron together could create enclosed spaces of any scale; second, that prefabrication and standardization could deliver complex buildings with extraordinary speed. Both lessons were absorbed deeply by the architects of the Modern Movement.
Mies and the Glass House: Modernism’s Glass Ideal (1945–1951)
The post-World War II period produced two of the most radical glass buildings in history, built almost simultaneously by architects who had been colleagues in Europe: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1951), and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). Both were single-story residences enclosed entirely in floor-to-ceiling glass panels, with no visual barrier between the interior and the landscape.
These buildings represented a philosophical statement — the dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, private and public, architecture and nature — made possible only by the then-new availability of large, flat, tempered glass panels from post-war industrial production. They also demonstrated, somewhat uncomfortably for their inhabitants, the limitations of glass as a wall material: Edith Farnsworth famously complained that the house was a fishbowl with no privacy and no ability to regulate temperature.
Today and Tomorrow: Structural Glass and the Disappearing Building
Contemporary architectural glass has addressed the thermal and privacy limitations of Mies’s glass walls through double and triple glazing, electrochromic coatings, and structural silicone glazing systems that eliminate visible metal framing entirely. The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, with its all-glass entrance cube (rebuilt in 2011 using just 15 larger panes to replace the original 90 smaller ones), represents the current state of structural glass artistry. The Apple Store uses custom-fabricated glass fins — essentially glass columns — to carry the roof load, with all structural elements in glass.
At the residential scale, this translates to the frameless shower enclosures, glass railings, and large-format mirrors that J&J Glassworks installs — the everyday residential expression of an architectural tradition stretching back to Rome. Ready to bring architectural glass into your home? Contact us for a free consultation.
Sources:
• Addis, B. — Building: 3,000 Years of Design Engineering and Construction, Phaidon, 2007
• Paxton, J. — Crystal Palace Construction Records, Victoria & Albert Museum Archive
• Suger, Abbot — De Administratione, trans. Panofsky, Princeton UP, 1946
• Frampton, K. — Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Thames & Hudson, 4th ed., 2007
• Apple Retail Store Technical Press Release — Fifth Avenue Glass Cube Renovation, 2011
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J&J Glassworks provides custom glass services for homeowners, designers, and builders across Bucks County. Call (215) 966-1577 to discuss your project.