Glass has always been synonymous with transparency and light, but today’s design and construction professionals are pushing this material beyond its traditional role. From innovative coatings that improve energy performance and occupant comfort to interior walls that balance privacy and openness through textural intrigue, glass is now central to both environmental strategy and expressive design. In contemporary architecture, the right glass solution can reduce bird collisions, enhance thermal performance, and double as a visual statement—contributing both to a building’s function and character.

Here, we explore the multifaceted potential of glass in the built environment. Learn how architects are applying high-performance glazing to adaptive reuse projects, how new coatings are redefining the limits of what glass can do, and how interior glass wall systems are embracing bold textures and finishes. You’ll also find a striking example of glass brick used in a sculptural Chilean pavilion, along with three window and door systems that deliver high performance without sacrificing aesthetics. Whether you’re specifying for comfort, efficiency, or standout design, these stories showcase glass at its most advanced and versatile.

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: comments@metropolismag.com

• Manufacturing

• Circularity in products
• Construction Materilas
• Healthy Materials
• Metropolis Editors
• supply chains

G

ay rodeo clowns, melted gummy bear movie theaters, pink chickens, and glitchy trash towers—the work of Martin Rodriguez Jr. (M.Arch Taubman College, 2025) is loaded with delightful contrasts, video game–inspired Easter eggs and plenty of queer joy. Rodriguez’s candy-coated color palette glides across physical modeling and digital world-building, always grounded in a deep care toward identity and accessibility—doubling down on pleasure and play. “If we see our subjects through a nonnormative lens,” he asks, “how can we apply more queerness and exuberance in spaces that erase that joy?”

Taking a page from queer culture’s relationship with archives and subtext, Rodriguez’s research often begins with a deep dive into a site’s queer past, before devising a program that both reanimates these histories and imagines worlds for possible futures. Rodeo, My Gay Rodeo (2022) draws on the legacy of the North American International Gay Rodeo Association, founded in Nevada in 1985, to unpack the 40-plus-year story of LGBTQIA+ rodeo culture. Set at the Clown Sanctuary and Performance Center in Detroit, the project brings together a diverse cohort of clowns and the many nonhuman protagonists who make a rodeo what it is. The result? A multispecies fun home with a boisterous blueprint (gym up top, barn on the bottom). 

Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s Turn into Candy! (2023) reimagines the movie theater that, with true “duck” style, embodies the saccharine stickiness of everyone’s favorite bear-shaped concession. ADA-compliant escape chutes and a rare Midjourney x marzipan collab that saw the student melting heaps of sugary sweetness and remixing it in the Midjourney machine to conjure the final form of this mixed-reality movie hall. 

What’s next in the fun factory? Berlin—a long-standing bastion of multimedia experimental art and queer expression—is an apt possibility on Rodriguez’s horizon. With an impressive grasp of game engine world-building, as seen in Gashapon and Gathering (both 2023)—which explore queer collectible culture in Japan and the gay icon of garbage, respectively—Rodriguez makes video games offer another promising medium. Wherever his work takes him, his practice embodies the joyful multiplex of queer design and the urgent need for playful, resilient, and open-ended world making today.

“A living wall is usually more like a mural of plants,” says Cornett. “This was a unique opportunity to think beyond it. How can we make it performative and create more of a habitat?” The team’s current thesis project pushes the technology even further with new types of clays and other natural materials. 

Rethinking Concrete Panel Design using CNC-Milled Foam Molds

Ebbi Boehm, a master’s candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, is rethinking the static nature of precast concrete molds, treating them less like typical uniform panels and more like decorative swatches from the world of fabric. Each ten-by-six-foot concrete panel from their project Swatch and Surface is made of eight CNC-milled foam molds, each with its own texture and relief. Integrated formwork, meanwhile, creates windowlike openings fitted with acrylic inserts, adding transparency and contrast. The result presents an astonishing variety of patterns and textures, as if it were a concrete patchwork quilt.  

“We were trying to challenge this heavy, monolithic, large slab that we often see in prefab,” says Boehm, who adds that the panels’ openings and variety can help manipulate shade and ventilation.  

Rebuilding Erased Sites in Berlin using Silicone Models

In her project A Blank Archipelago, SCI-Arc graduate student Naseem Soltani takes a new approach to rebuilding “erased” sites in Berlin—specifically the city’s Molkenmarkt, bombed in World War II and now divided into three distinct pieces, which Soltani calls “islands.” Instead of re-creating the original market or building what she calls a “high-tech facade ecstasy,” she proposes a third approach—documenting what remains on the site through drawings and then recasting them into various forms via flexible silicone models. “Just because we can’t re-create the past, I don’t think that means we have to fling ourselves off the cliff and just gaze into the future,” says Soltani, who notes that her “blank” creations, less overtly charged with political or social meaning, nonetheless evoke a wide range of responses from viewers. They’ve changed how she looks at the role buildings play in clients’ agendas. “They don’t really feel like buildings so much once you understand how they’re intended to be read.”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: comments@metropolismag.com

• No tags selected

• Future 100
• innovative construction
• New Materials
• Sam Lubell
• Speculative Design

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: comments@metropolismag.com

• Healthcare

• Behavioral Health Care
• Biophilia
• Dinky Asrani
• Inclusive Design

About a mile away from the Walled City Center of Cartagena, Colombia, lies an ordinary street characterized by low-slung concrete homes, mismatched bricks, cracked plaster facades, and the cacophony coming from buildings in various states of construction. But for Kelly Dix Van, this familiar Latin American street and its everyday, popular buildings offer valuable lessons in material reuse. 

“More than 40 percent of the built environment is unregulated and does not follow the rules of construction. The cities of Latin America have witnessed the existence of a type of city that is built day by day, completely detached from public policies and real estate projects produced by private initiatives,” writes Dix Van in her thesis zine, Everyday, Popular, Matters. The site of her thesis research, Paseo Bolívar, is in a constant state of flux, representing the speed of Cartagena’s informal urban growth. This makes it a perfect case study for Dix Van to explore her research question: “Can we think of material reuse in ways that integrate heritage, people, labor, memories, knowledge, economies of production, and domestic acts?” 

Through photography and intricate handmade models, Dix Van catalogs fragments of materials from her site, creating a historical account of each material found in the house, from cast concrete blocks to encaustic cement tiles to hollow clay bricks. For her, self-built communities offer a more “cohesive solution to housing and urban needs,” and the builders have developed ways of cataloging and redistributing end-of-life salvage building components. “When you come from a country of limited resources, you’re used to not wasting them.”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: comments@metropolismag.com

• Cultural
• Healthcare
• Hospitality
• Infrastructure

• Design Trends
• Glass
• Interior Products
• Murrye Bernard

Challenging Traditional Water Infrastructure

Croft’s “coast-to-coast” perspective manifests in projects that tackle waste systems, flood futures, water infrastructure and the need to imagine beyond the linear-progressive “crash” course of the Anthropocene. Her work as a graduate research assistant for Assistant Professor Debbie Chen on Intermediary Softness (2023–2024)—a gossamer fabric-shingle pavilion for holding rainwater on RISD’s own beachfront property—make the case for a softer “catch-and-release” response to the stubborn bureaucracy of many water infrastructure projects, which supports her interest in the scale. Alongside Good/Poor (2023), a sculptural installation that riffs on the American Framing pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale to challenge rigid binaries in wood construction, Alexandra’s work embraces a material sensitivity, exalting in the pleasures and possibilities of becoming fluid and open to adaptation.

Ecological Methods of Construction

Meanwhile, Ground Unit (2024) and The Cloyster (2023) radiate outward to a system scale, embracing new social and ecological frameworks for surviving with—not against—the rising tides and resources panic brought on by anthropogenic climate change. Ground Unit digs into the urban noir of waste systems in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, offering a kind of pneumatic soil bank that breathes in contamination and breathes out remediation. The Cloyster, set along the ever-expanding salt marshes of New Bedford, Massachusetts’s Acushnet River, dabbles in a speculative seapunk living co-operative, rewiring notions of private property into a community land trust within the briny embrace of a changing planet.

After she graduates, infrastructural intrigue and watery persuasions may lead her on to a postgraduate summertime venture in Belgium, where she hopes to further deepen her study of carbon-conscious earthen construction between liquid and land. By embracing the choppy current of our environmental future, Croft’s practice will remain buoyant wherever it takes her—and us—next.