April 15, 2026
The Evolution of Structural Glass Design
In this video, James O'Callaghan traces structural glass from its emergence in the mid‑1990s as a substitute for wood and steel through to its use in the present day. Glass offers unique transparency, strength, and stiffness, making it suitable for beams, floors, and columns. However, its purely elastic behavior provides no warning before failure. Key challenges center mainly on connections, where failure can occur without visible signs of overstress. Because bolted connections create such problematic local stresses, novel inserted connections were developed to preserve transparency and improve structural efficiency . Realised projects include Apple's Fifth Avenue cube (2006 and 2011), Zorlu in Istanbul, and the Steve Jobs Theater. Lastly, James O'Callaghan advises future engineers to approach glass with curiosity, not limiting it to windows or structural roles, but exploring its full potential. Despite its embodied carbon, glass remains vital for connecting people to light and the outdoors. Its future depends on fresh, naive eyes that ask what glass can do, not what it has done. The video was produced by the Open GLASSroom project. Special thanks to James O'Callaghan for contributing to the Open GLASSroom OER collection. The creation of these resources has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grant program of the European Union under grant no. 2022-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000089750. Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency DAAD are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.