From skyscrapers to cinemas: how glass transformed architecture

Glass blocks were the future once. In the late 19th century, they were a new wonder material, bringing light to dingy cellars. There were diamond-shaped glass blocks and crimson lozenges, shapes that looked like boiled sweets and others that resembled brilliant-cut jewels. In the 20th century, they lit up the hearts of urban tower blocks, the roofs of arcades, courtyards and subterranean spaces. They even brought light below deck on ships, in cellars and factories. 

They were preceded by Gustave Falconnier’s blown-glass blocks, eye-shaped units that would tessellate into elegant screens. After their introduction in the 1880s, knock-offs popped up everywhere, often in industrial architecture, where lights were needed but window views for workers were considered unnecessary. 

Viennese architect Otto Wagner used glass blocks in the floors of his Postal Savings Bank (1904-06) creating a luminous basement, and Auguste Perret used them in his proto-deco apartment block on the Rue Franklin in Paris at exactly the same time. But it was Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre (1928-32) that really showed off what the material could do. Set in the courtyard of a Parisian block, this curious live/work space for a gynaecologist had luminous walls but was impenetrable to views. 

In the 1920s, glass blocks built a new architecture of the night. Buildings dematerialised, turning themselves into beacons in the dark. Already in 1914, there was Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion at the Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition, a curious, crystalline dome atop a cylinder of glass block. In the early 1930s, the Ohio Oil company built gas stations from glass block, too — glowing roadside jewels, a new material for a new kind of building. Shell and Direct Oil followed with their logos emblazoned on translucent, pavilion-like gas stations. 

The skyscraper, that other new form of building, was another structure for glass-block experimentation. New York’s Barbizon Plaza Hotel (Laurence Emmons, 1930, now the Trump Parc) employed glass blocks to create a golden glowing crown. In 1933, the Owens-Illinois Glass Block Building showed exactly what could be done at the Century of Progress Chicago World’s Fair. A stepped structure culminating in a slender tower was a glass block building in which the architecture was designed to evanesce within during the day and be a multicoloured lantern at night. 

The main hall of the Austrian Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, Austria © Jeannette Tas Cinemas, too, found a parallel to the translucence of the screen. Glass block frontages seemed to present an opening into a world of light — for example, the Senator Theatre in Baltimore with its blackcurrant and lime curving façade (1939, designed by John Zink). 

In the US, Swiss-born architect William Lescaze introduced glass blocks to the avant garde with his 1934 Modernist house and studio, built for himself on New York’s East 48th Street. 

By the end of the 1930s, glass blocks were used on storefronts, curving corners, milk-bars, motels and factories. They brought a cheaper version of streamlined architecture to Main Street. Curved glass was expensive and difficult, but a curve of blocks could be laid by any builder. 

The Hermès store in Ginza, Tokyo designed by Renzo Piano © Whatsoeverhk/Dreamstime 

Through the 1940s, glass blocks brought modernity to otherwise budget buildings — many of which survive in the shabbier streets of Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. They reappeared in the 1980s, this time in interiors. As lofts became popular in New York, they were an efficient way to bring light into the middle of a building. And, perhaps, there is something sexy about a glimpse of bathroom from the bedroom (this was before en suites and open-plan living were fashionable). Suddenly there were curved shower screen walls, luminous, fluorescent-stripped room dividers and glass block cocktail bars, often illuminated by neons to give that classy, Essex nightclub vibe. 

Future Systems’ Hauer-King House in Canonbury, London, (1993) revived the aesthetic with a neo-modernist twist. Upmarket fashion developed a particular fetish. Renzo Piano kicked off another unlikely revival with his Maison Hermès in Tokyo (2006).

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A recent slew of houses have revelled in glass block, using it more in the manner of their 1930s predecessors as a way of making walls diaphanous. There is Marcio Kogan’s Cobogo House in São Paulo; Atelier Tekuto’s ’80s-retro Crystal Brick Houses in Tokyo and they also appear in the Beijing Courtyard Hybrid, a retread of the Chinese Hutong courtyard house by Vector Architects. 

The Optical Glass House in Hiroshima by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP (2013) is an elegant essay in just what can be done and how this once-maligned material can be resurrected. 

I remember the glass blocks outside a factory near where I grew up and in winter the basement lights would make the pavement glow. It looked like something between a disco floor and a jewel, a sensation of walking on glass that thrilled a little. The glass blocks deserve their comeback.