The Art of Glass

Growing client demand for increasingly large glazing areas that can be incorporated seamlessly into the yacht’s overall styling are creating fascinating technological solutions.

- Tony Jones 

THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY 

started the craze for frameless windows way back in the early 1990s when it developed the direct bonding of windscreens. Their motive was simply production efficiency rather than styling, but frameless soon became the thing to have.

This, in turn, presented large yacht builders and glass suppliers with a problem. While it’s fairly easy to make the windscreen aperture of a car stiff enough to not dynamically load the glass, the task is much more difficult on large yachts. The eventual solution was to replace the stiffness lost by the absence of frames with structural pillars that were invisible from outside except up close. The glass could then be bonded into shallow rebates around the perimeter, and directly to the vertical pillars.

Hot on the heels of direct bonding came the requirement to match the double curvature that was easily obtained with metal or composites in larger expanses of the superstructure. (Topsides present less of a challenge, as they are usually flat or single curvature).

Superyacht designers and owners don’t like to hear the word ‘can’t’, so the industry responded by developing advanced techniques to produce glass that not long ago would have been considered science fiction This meant changes to the chemical makeup of the glass itself, facilities to produce much larger sheets, and advance technologies such as sag and pressure bending to form the required shapes. Dimmable glass was the next big thing, both to assist in heat rejection and to overcome the potential lack of privacy, which is unavoidable when you have very large windows.