Has anyone ever used/seen glass block (or specialty product) used for exterior flooring that lets light thru?
Or any surface that can let light thru AND be wallked on?
Planning a small balcony over the front door area under a wide porch – thinking it would be nice to let some light in to the entry area ? Any opinions welcome – yes I sometimes think outside the box.
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Check bdack issues of FHB. I seem to remember a floor in a home that was glass block on the second floor. May have been one of the annual house design issues. As I remember it was inside, not outside in the weather.
yes you can do that. I worked on a house in Laguna Beach, Calif. and the owner wanted the same thing. He hired a glass company to make glass panels and they were about30"x36" and had wavy, irregular curves. You could see right up from underneath. All us guys joked that he put them there for "panty checks". The were 2 layers thick of 1/2" glass, I think. Don't remenber if there was a space betrween the glass layers or just one glass layer.
Now to the funny part. The floor of the balcony was having a terazzo floor put in. the terrazzo was filled with abalone, oyster, cross sections of conche shell, and a bunch of other shells in a mortor base. The terrazzo was being ground smooth so they had to take the pieces of plywood out of the glass opening so they could work on them. The owner was on the balcony he all of a sudden, he saw this pretty girl come in through the front door. She specialized in 3 dimensional glass etchings and she was there for a meeting with the designer and contractor. The owner saw here and immediately started to walk toward her and began to ask "can I help youuuuuuuuuu!!!". He walked right into one of the holes and fell to the lower level and into the empty hot tub. It was so funny to hear about, too bad I missed it. The glass lady said that it was just like in the cartoon, The roadrunner, where Wylie Coyote walks through a hole on the edge of a cliff and down 500 feet and then you see a puff of smoke. The homeowner wasn't hurt too bad, but his ego was.
A friend of mine called him "The Duck". You know... "If it walks like a duck, it must be a duck"
This is a true story. No B.S. or exageration either. Just don't do what he did. And yes, I really do think he put those glass panels there for panty checks. He was a letch. He would try to check out every set of breasts that walked onto the site. He even constantly hit on one married woman.
http://www.bobvila.com/ArticleLibrary/Subject/Floors/Miscellaneous/GlassBlockFloor.html
http://www.archINFORM.net/medien/00009007.htm?ID=20d421af28ba5555dea1824feb045bd2
http://www.usglassmag.com/backissues/0004/0004goingagainstgrain.html
and especially http://www.circleredmont.com/html/applications.htm
THANKS, GREAT INFO, JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR !
NOW I can plan and design and figure out if I can afford any of it :-)
Click on the Advanced Search button near the top of the left hand frame and search for messages containing the exact phrase
glass floor
There have been several discussions on this topic in the last year or so.
A library near here has them in the whole second floor, awsome effect! They just used glass block in a steel frame. wonderful!
The world's tallest freestanding structure (that would be the CN Tower in Toronto) apparently has a glass block floor about 1000 (thousand) feet or so up in the air. Never been there to try it out. Apparently the kids just love it. Sorry, guess that would be exterior on one surface only.