Wrightstyle

Light and glass in modern architecture

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:01:07 GMT

Light and glass go hand in hand. Most building materials have weight and mass, whether concrete, a brick or a length of structural steel. There is, however, one building material that has neither weight nor mass.

The Greeks called it Helios, the Romans Sol and, despite forming over 98% of the solar system, it is technically a Yellow G2 Dwarf, one of over 400 billion other stars in just our small corner of the universe.

Every second it converts about 700 million tons of hydrogen into about 695 million tons of helium and five million tons of energy, generating 386 billion billion mega Watts.

It takes light from the Sun about eight minutes to reach Earth or 1.3 seconds for reflected light to bounce from the Moon, and without it we would be in a cold and dark place.

In terms of building design, the Sun’s generosity was recognized by the 20th century architect Louis Kahn who once remarked, “the sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.”

Another iconic designer, Le Corbusier, said that “architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

It adds up to an architectural philosophy that’s about how we integrate the internal and the external of a building to create structures that bring the outside inside, making best use of ambient light, and creating spaces most conducive for work, rest and play.

Light in Architecture

First Extensive Use of Glass in Buildings

Arguably, that new glass age was heralded by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, essentially a giant greenhouse with some one million square feet of glass. What made it possible was the recent invention of cast plate glass, a cheap but strong glass type. For the first time, a commercial building of considerable size – over 550 metres long and nearly 40 metres high – had been constructed almost entirely from glass.

Only thirteen years later, Oriel Chambers in Liverpool was completed, recognized by many as the first example of metal-framed curtain walling in the UK. Now Grade 1 Listed, an 1866 article in The Builder was less than complimentary: “The plainest brick warehouse in town is infinitely superior as a building to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles termed Oriel Chambers.” So, it didn’t please everyone.

But Arthur Korn’s new glass age is still with us, as glass and framing systems have continued to evolve, driven by changing perspectives of urbanism and new architectural thinking. Not least, glass has evolved to deal with both threat and opportunity – from the need to make buildings safe from terrorist attack to providing, for example, thermal comfort and improved air quality.

The New Glass Age

Two of the first modern buildings to embrace that philosophy were the UN Building and Lever House in New York, completed in 1952, both of which made extensive use of glass instead of the traditional steel and stone.

A third soon followed: the Seagram Building, also in New York, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Completed in 1958, with a glass façade making the building transparent and reflective, it helped to change the way that designers thought about form and function.

That changed philosophy saw light become a fundamental part of the architectural process, a shift in mainstream design perspective that was earlier championed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s. Much influenced by Japanese architecture that placed buildings within their wider context, he was one of the first to propose steel and glass construction, arguing that “form and function are one.”

He wasn’t alone. German architect Arthur Korn, wrote in 1929: “Glass is an extraordinary material. It gave us the beauty of medieval stained glass windows. Tightly held between supporting piers they opened a door to allow a glimpse of paradise in luminous colours from the shadow of the grave.

“Nothing has been lost from the richness of those earlier creations, but glass has now been associated with other materials to meet new functions. A new glass age has begun, which is equal in beauty to the old one of Gothic windows.”

Light and Glass Come of Age

Modern glass composites have near-perfect optical quality and can stop a fire for two hours or more, prevent bullets from passing through – and withstand the detonation of a high explosive charge. Glass is, however, merely a go-between – a translucent membrane between an interior space and the world beyond.

What joins the two is a weightless building material that is ever-changing and infinitely more important, giving context and meaning to our surroundings and the buildings in which we live and work.

Shopping Centre Fires

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:57:09 GMT

n a two-part article, Jane Embury, marketing director, looks at shopping centres fire safety.

We don’t often think about fire breaking out in our local shopping centre.

However, let’s remember that in July a fire engulfed a shopping centre in Walthamstow, east London.

And just last month, a serious fire broke out in a shopping centre in Douglas, County Cork.

The fact is that retail fires account for about 10% of “large fire losses.”

Of those, some 20% are in shopping centres. Many are started deliberately.

In a shopping centre, responsibility for fire safety can be complex.

The shopping centre management team will have responsibility for the communal areas.

FRA

But responsibility then passes to individual shops for their own premises.

The law requires that a competent person carries out a Fire Risk Assessment (FRA).

If you employ more than five people, that written FRA must be kept on file.

The FRA is all about identifying risk, and minimising or eliminating those risks.

But it’s also about ensuring the safety of firefighters if there is a fire, and looking at the continuity of the business.

In the UK, there are 42 shopping centres over 70,000 sq metres in size.

The biggest is Westfield in west London at 235,900 sq metres.

Royal Exchange

It’s taken the biggest crown from the Metrocentre in Gateshead, at 192,900 square metres.

(The UK’s first shopping centre was opened in 1660, and surrounded the Royal Exchange. It had 100 kiosks and shops).

Current safety requirements require collaboration between the designers, developers, fire system installers and the centre’s management team based on Building Control Regulations. It’s the reason why UK shopping centres are so safe.

But compare that with a shopping centre fire in Asunción, Paraguay in 2004. In total, 364 people lost their lives.

Underlining how responsibility for fire safety lies not just in the hands of the shopping centre management team, the fire started in an improperly-maintained grill located in the centre’s food court.

Of course, worldwide, the threat from fire is being slowly reduced with stricter building regulations covering both passive and active fire safety measures.

Smoke and fire

That includes everything from better detection systems to catch the fire early to better sprinkler systems to put it out.

The Paraguay fire started with just an ember from a chimney, and that’s how most catastrophic fires begin – often just a dropped cigarette or a spark from faulty wiring.

Fire is spread through three methods: convection, conduction and radiation, of which convection is the most dangerous.

This is when smoke from the fire becomes trapped by the roof, spreading in all directions to form a deepening layer. Smoke, rather than fire, is often the real danger.

Materials such as metal can absorb heat and transmit it to other rooms or shops by conduction, where it can cause new fires to break out.

Radiation transfers heat in the air, until it too sets off secondary fires, spreading the danger away from its original location.

Radiation was the culprit in a 2012 shopping centre in Qatar. where an electrical fire started near a child care centre, going on to trap the children and their teachers.

In total, 13 children died, mostly from smoke inhalation. Four teachers and two firefighters also died.

Fire zones

The fact is that shopping centres can be extremely complex, with potentially large fuel loads and equally large numbers of people.

They can include not just shops. Many shopping centres also have hotels, food courts, cinemas, restaurants, bars and offices.

That’s why compartmentation is so important. It divides the building into discrete fire zones, with retardant materials to limit the spread of fire.

That’s where our internal and external advanced steel systems come in.

They’ve been tested together to US, Asian and European standards. And to furnace temperatures of well over 1000˚c.

That both tests the strength of the glass and its framing system, because if one fails, the whole system fails.

This is the core function of an integrated glass and framing system.

By preventing oxygen from reaching the seat of the fire, it provides an effective barrier against the passage of fire, heat and toxic gas.

This allows people to escape and, by containing the fire, minimises fire damage.

The main lesson from Qatar and Paraguay is that fire can spread with devastating speed. That’s particularly so in a large open space such as a supermarket or shopping centre.

The key is containment, trapping the fire, and allowing people to escape. It’s the reason why our systems can be found in shopping centres around the world.

In the second part of this article, Jane will look at some landmark shopping centre projects that we’ve supplied to.

Photo courtesy of Krisztina Papp on Unsplash

Going ballistic

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:56:05 GMT

Many people think that bullet-proof glass is bullet proof, the answer is yes, but not necessarily.

It depends on the protection level of the frame and the glass.

As always, it comes down to a preliminary threat assessment, to determine the risk to both property and life.

For example, the level of protection required for a government or military building will be higher than the local post office.

When a bullet is fired at a sheet of bullet-resistant glass, it will penetrate the glass layers.

But it’s the interlayer, or interlayers, of polycarbonate and polyurethane, or a mixture of both, sandwiched inside the glass that absorbs the projectile’s energy and prevents it going through.

However, there are many kinds of ballistic projectile – ranging from shotgun, through to 9mm and .44 magnum handguns.

These might be the kind of ballistic threats that a petrol station or retail bank branch might reasonably want to protect against.

But at the other end of the scale are rifle calibres, for example, of 5.56mm or 7.62mm, with armour-piercing capabilities.

The penetration of bullets into building components depends primarily on the bullet velocity and the type of bullet. The typical bullet velocities are:

Handguns 300 to 500 m/s

Rifles 700 to 1,000 m/s

Shotguns about 600 m/s

A common misconception is that only the glass needs to be rated. However, the frame also needs to match the specified threat level to ensure a complete and engineered solution.

Wrightstyle’s advanced ballistic systems, which include both the glass and its frame, are designed as a primary system against ballistic attack, offering protection from a range of firearms.

Ballistic testing has been undertaken by a UKAS Accredited Test Laboratory, to the British and European Standard DIN EN 1522 (framing) and DIN EN 1063 (glass).

Testing to this standard is considered the most stringent and provides the highest level of protection.

In addition, our range of ballistic steel glazing systems combined with glass have been tested to the following international standards: CEN 1063 BR1 TO BR7, BS5051 G1 TO R2ap, STANAG 4569 Level 1 to 3, DIN 52290 Levels 1 to 5, UL752-1991, UNE 108-131086 levels 1 to5.

All our manufacturing processes are undertaken to Quality Management System BS EN ISO 9001: 2015, which ensures that uniformity is consistent by way of regular audits.

We can offer a fully fabricated product with or without glass and installation, along with design and specification advice.

We are able to offer ballistic and fire rated systems as well as ballistic and blast rated assemblies.

A video link can be found here

Main picture: Arran Wright, workshop and training manager, examines a demonstration door that was fired at by a range of calibres, at the ballistic testing centre. It allows us to show customers or visitors the effects of various weapons on both the glass and the door frame.

Remembering the King’s Cross disaster thirty years on

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:34:45 GMT

Wrightstyle supplied fire-rated systems to the iconic King’s Cross redevelopment in London, both to the station itself and surrounding projects. Wrightstyle’s managing director, Tim Kempster, remembers events of 30 years ago.

The term “codifying by disaster” has a long and dishonourable history. It’s the term used to to describe how advances in safety regulations and fire-rated systems often only come about following appalling tragedy.

In a year which has seen the Grenfell Tower disaster, and new regulations will inevitably be brought in, it’s worth remembering a London train station tragedy thirty years ago that claimed the lives of 31 people.

However, what marks the King’s Cross fire as different in scope and scale is that, not only did it lead to better fire safety regulation, it helped us all better understand an unknown dynamic in how a small fire can become a conflagration.

King’s Cross station, completed in 1852 on the site of a former smallpox hospital, is reputedly haunted by the ghost of Queen Boudicca and is the railway station from which, as every Harry Potter fan knows, you catch the train for Hogwarts.

The station handles nearly 50 million station users each year and, inevitably, security is of paramount importance, not least because of the 2005 bombing outrage, which killed 52 people, with the four bombers traveling into King’s Cross before carrying out their murderous attacks. Although it remains the worst terrorist attack in London, it wasn’t the first at the station. In 1973, a Provisional IRA bomb also detonated in King’s Cross’s booking hall, injuring six people, several seriously.

Grease and rubbish

Appalling as those incidents were, it was a major fire at the station in November 1987 which has had arguably the greater influence on public safety. Started most probably by a discarded match, despite smoking having been banned in the Underground two years earlier, the source of the fire was an escalator shaft dating back to before World War II.

Trench effect

That theory is called the trench effect, and involved hot gases in the buoyant plume to lie along the escalator surface, creating a rapid airflow that caused the gases to move up the escalator, increasing in proportion to the size of the fire, and eventually creating an effect much like a flamethrower, sending flames shooting upwards into the ticket hall.

The computer modeling of the “fluid flow” of the fire helped to substantially advance the science of fire dynamics, using computational simulation to look at how fires behave, with an emphasis on smoke and heat movement from their source.

The subsequent Fennell Investigation into the fire prompted the replacement of all wooden escalators on the Underground, the installation of automatic sprinklers and heat detectors in escalators, mandatory fire safety training for all station staff twice a year, and improvements in emergency services liaison.

Fire training and fire-rated systems

The King’s Cross fire, and the impact of computer modeling, has helped inform fire training since and also influenced how companies such as Wrightstyle, which has been significantly involved in complex transportation projects, design the steel and glass fire-rated systems that mitigate against threats caused by fire.

Platform 9 3/4 and fire-rated systems

In supplying glazed components to the frontage of the new King’s Cross, as well as a safe evacuation route from the main administrative areas, we have brought a wealth of experience and expertise from other UK transport infrastructure projects, as well as overseas contracts in Hong Kong and Dubai. Our advice to specifiers, based on extensive fire and bomb testing, is simple: always specify the glass and steel components as one integrated and tested assembly.

King’s Cross has had to learn painful lessons from its past, to build a facility offering the safest possible transit for its millions of customers every year. The lessons learned have also been applied in cities across the world.

Boudicca, queen of the Iceni who led a revolt against the Romans, is reputedly buried under platforms 8, 9 or 10. It’s possible that the Battle of Watling Street, at which she was finally defeated, took place where the station now stands. Her ghost is said to haunt some of the underground passages. It’s also a place of pilgrimage for budding wizards, with Network Rail designating a Platform 9¾ with a luggage trolley half buried into the wall. The bad news is that rail services only go as far as Scotland.

It was partially built from flammable wood and the running track of the escalator had not been cleaned since the 1940s and was covered in grease and filled with rubbish.

However, the importance of the tragedy in the evolving story of fire safety is that its severity was initially inexplicable. There was a lack of visible flames, and the firemen first on the scene – who had attended other similar fires – believed that it posed little threat. Indeed, fire-fighters later described it as being about the size and intensity of a campfire.

Amid the complacency, the situation rapidly became worse, with the fire appearing to flash over and fill the ticket hall with flames and smoke. Far from now being a campfire, fire-fighters trying to re-enter the ticket hall described conditions as similar to climbing into a volcano.

It was later shown that a combination of wind movements caused by underground trains arriving and leaving created a 12mph wind in a “piston effect”, pushing air from the tunnels upwards and adding to the speed of the fire spreading. However, it took groundbreaking computer modeling and fire simulation, then in its infancy, to promote a new theory of fire development within inclined shafts.

Bradford City Fire Disaster

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:24:25 GMT

Wrightstyle’s Technical Director, Lee Coates, takes a deeper look at the Bradford City fire (at the football stadium) and the consequences.

This May will mark the 30th anniversary of one of the UK’s worst fire disasters, when 56 people died at Bradford City’s football stadium. Over 250 other supporters from both Bradford City and Lincoln City were injured, many seriously. There will be a service of civic remembrance, as well as other memorials – including at Bradford’s last home game of the season at Valley Parade against Barnsley on April 25th. Funds raised will go to the University of Bradford Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit (PSBRU). The memorials and fund-raising efforts are supported by The Football Association, The Premier League and the Football League. A minute’s silence will also be observed at football grounds across the country.

The fire was most likely caused by a dropped cigarette or match falling into a void area beneath one of the ground’s stands, and soon engulfed the whole structure, including the roof. Worse, people had to break down locked exits to escape.

New safety legislation – sports grounds

The subsequent Popplewell Report introduced new safety legislation for sports grounds across the country. While welcome, such reports have sometimes been called “codifying by catastrophe” – how fire and other safety regulations have often come about because of tragedy. In stadium design, the most awful example remains the UK’s worst football disaster, which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans in 1989 – because of crush injury. The subsequent Taylor Report led to radical change, and the much safer stadiums we see today – including the elimination of standing-only terraces. As a mark of respect and remembrance for those who lost their lives as a result of the Hillsborough stadium disaster, all FA Cup, Premier League, Football League and Football Conference matches taking place on the weekend of 11-14 April will kick-off seven minutes later than originally scheduled.

Other stadium disasters

However, the real tragedy is that radical change hadn’t been enacted sooner – for example, following the Ibrox Stadium disaster in 1971, when 66 Glasgow Rangers fans were killed and over 200 injured in a crush on a stairway. The principal legislation relating to fire in major stadiums is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Under it, the club must plan, organise, control, monitor and review the necessary preventive and protective measures and record these arrangements in writing. In Scotland, the regulations are the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005, as amended, and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006. UEFA also offers guidance, making clear that “major lessons have been learned from the fire-related stadium disasters of the past.” They insist upon active measures such as extinguishers and sprinkler systems and passive measures such as fire sectorisation and fire doors.

Passive measures

It’s those passive measures that we specialize in at Wrightstyle. We supplied elements to both the London Olympic main stadium and the adjacent ArcelorMittal Orbit, the 115 metre high observation tower. We have also supplied to the Athens Olympics, the Asian Games and FIFA – and, closer to home, to the national FA facility at St George’s Park in Staffordshire.

Nowadays, major stadiums have crowd safety as their first design prerequisite; from entrances and exits that can cope with large numbers of patrons, to major incident plans (MIPs) to deal with any eventuality. Not least, modern stadiums are built with lots of concrete, steel and fire-rated glass to minimise the risks posed by fire.

In many instances, it has been our ability to demonstrate independent testing against both fire and smoke that has proved a decisive factor, underlining the highly-specialist nature and international context of the steel glazing market. As we constantly point out, the main lesson for designers is not simply to build in passive and active fire systems, but to look at the whole stadium or building’s capacity to withstand a fire. For the glazed components, that should mean analysing the level of containment the glass will provide and its compatibility with its framing systems.

Fire – containment

Those levels of containment are absolutely vital in a stadium, with very large numbers of people in a restricted area and who, in the event of a fire, may not always follow proper evacuation procedures. Evacuation models, based on engineering and computational tools, don’t necessarily reflect the variable nature of human reaction. For example, if a family or group member is away from their seat when an alarm sounds – perhaps buying food on a concourse – they will often go back to their seat to find others in their party before making any decision to evacuate. It adds up to a delayed flight time that the stadium’s design and evacuation procedures must address. In buildings research, as much as two-thirds of the time it takes people to exit a building after an alarm is start-up time – time wasted in looking for more information, or not taking the alarm seriously.

Stadia do, of course, have the advantage of having PA systems and a scoreboard on which information can be posted. However, human psychology is also at work, and the passive fire measures employed in the stadium’s design must also factor in a delayed evacuation response.

That’s why modern steel glazing systems are so important, either for the exterior envelope of the stadium or for internal screens and fire doors. With advanced glazing systems able to provide up to 120 minutes of protection against the spread of fire, smoke or toxic gases, they have become an integral part of modern stadium design, giving people more than enough time to evacuate and protecting escape routes along the way.

Stadium design has come a long way in the past few decades, driven by new regulations to deliver a new generation of safer stadiums. But it’s also a tragedy that it’s taken catastrophe to make it happen, particularly for those caught up in the Bradford disaster 30 years ago.