Six years of planning, drafting and revising culminated in the development of a 30-foot all-glass bridge built using ancient engineering and architectural principles.
The bridge, dubbed “Glass Bridge: The Penn Monument for Hope,” was built by University of Pennsylvania professor of architecture Masoud Akbarzadeh and research assistant Boyu Xiao of the Weitzman School of Design, along with collaborators including Yao Lu of Jefferson University. It resides at the Corning Museum of Glass.
The bridge comprises interlocking hollow glass units without traditional reinforcements, such as steel.
“All these pieces alone, hollow glass units, might seem quite brittle—and they are,” says Akbarzadeh. “But depending on how you design to put these glass units together, they start relying on each other, and the units’ assembly establishes a path for the load to be transferred efficiently. Thus, the bridge gains strength as a whole.”
The project began in 2017 with the conceptualization and design of the bridge. Akbarzadeh says the original concept centered around using thin sheets of glass to build a “super-efficient structure.” The engineering drew on techniques that date back to the Mesopotamian age, around 4000 BCE, particularly funicular design, which harnesses compression to achieve stability and strength.
Akbarzadeh and his team designed the bridge to “channel forces along ideal compression paths.” According to a Penn release, “Every glass unit, joint and angle was optimized so that the bridge’s arch would carry the load primarily through compression rather than bending forces—a method as ancient as the Sumerian U arches, now realized through cutting-edge computation and fabrication technologies.”
Lu says that one of the earliest hurdles was solving the problem of joining the glass modules without inducing stress points that lead to fractures. Male and female key joints were initially considered, but the shapes were difficult to construct out of glass. The team eventually used structural double-sided tape. To ensure a proper balance of flexibility and rigidity, polyvinyl butyral (PVB) was selected.
“But with these connectors, every cut, every angle, every dimension had to be accurate within 0.1 millimeters,” says Akbarzadeh. “When you’re dealing with 124 separate glass units, even the tiniest misalignment can multiply across the entire span. If we didn’t maintain that level of precision, the whole structure could have collapsed under its own weight.”
The bridge’s construction occurred onsite at Corning over a period of three weeks in November 2024.
Glasbau Pritz constructed the bridge’s hollow glass units. Theile Glass provided glass milling and lamination services. Saint-Gobain manufactured the low-carbon glass. The glass laminates were made using Kuraray’s Trosifol Extra Stiff Pro, and the structural connection component featured thick SentryGlas.
Source: Glass Bridge with additional information added by GlassBalkan
