Walk over glass for floors and skylights

Walk over glass is used for floors and skylights, which are increasingly popular in modern-style buildings. In fact, contemporary architecture favors totally transparent walk over surfaces that diffuse brightness into the location and seem to overcome any material constraint.

Walk over glasses are increasingly present in stairwells or in apartments with a light and minimal look. They create floors, stairs, roofs, walkways with a neat and innovative design.

Let’s find out together what types of glass are suitable for creating transparent walk over surfaces and what advantages and protection they guarantee for floors and skylights.

Types of glass

These types of glass are composed of several sheets, different in thickness and technology according to the place for which they are intended and the loads moving on them.

The technologies used for their implementation make walk over glass resistant and safe.

They are composed of overlapping glass, alternating with layers of glue and laminated together. In this way we obtain sheets which have variable thicknesses according to the number of layers used and which are able to offer considerable resistance to stress. Thus walk over glass is able to withstand considerable loads. In addition, the insertion of a thin film between the glass sheets ensures that the glass does not fragment in case of breakage.

Walk over glass can offer several aesthetic solutions:

• transparent;
• satin;
• printed:
• with images inserted between the layers;
• decorated.

This makes it particularly flexible to the many architectural, functional and design solutions, and allows the creation of absolutely transparent and almost immaterial surfaces or walk over sheets with a decidedly solid look.

In some contexts, transparency is necessary to emphasize spaces and communicate a sort of freedom from structural constraints, which, however, are always respected by highly resistant structures despite the floating look. To ensure privacy, it is sometimes better to install satin or decorated glass sheets.

Advantages

Walk over glass offers many advantages to spaces. In the most frequent and contemporary aesthetic solution, floors and skylights occupy the space with lightness and personality. The volume seems to disappear and the passage on these walk over surfaces becomes an experience to be lived with pleasure and curiosity.

The choice of walk over glass is mostly connected to three factors:

• brightness;
• ecology;
• design.

Brightness is the most important of the advantages of walk over glass. Not all buildings can benefit from natural lighting at all levels. Let’s take as an example underground garages or shopping malls or the stairwell of a hotel in the city center. These structures can hardly enjoy the sunlight, but if the design involves walk over glass staircases, transparent balconies or at least glass corners large enough to let light to pervade the structure, the rooms appear bright and consequently spacious and soothing.

Light enters the building, transforming structures and coatings into light sources capable of creating fascinating effects, which enrich the spaces in a natural and variable way according to the colours of the sky. Thus the spaces are enlivened by the light.

This choice is increasingly shared by contemporary architecture and also meets the ecological demands of a low environmental impact. The use of low-emission or selective thermal glass reduces the consumption of heating and air conditioning, naturally maintaining the optimal temperatures indoors.

There is certainly also an aesthetic component for which walk over glass is one of the most attractive elements of modern buildings. The gaze is lost to dream up the absence of gravity and matter; it is projected into a fantastic imaginary induced by the original design produced by the glass components.

Protection

The protection offered by walk over glass on floors and skylights is total. The magnificent transparency is accompanied by robustness and safety.

The use of shatterproof glass makes the walk over surfaces capable of supporting heavy weights and withstanding shocks. In this way they give the parts of buildings to which they belong the same degree of protection offered by traditional structures.

The walk over glass is also resistant to high temperatures, ensuring safety in case of fire. It can be used for flooring or steps, always offering a safe walk over floor.

Although the glass surfaces inside the buildings are sometimes very large, the glass used for this kind of construction offers high protection from heat and cold from outside. The choice of a glass suitable to contain the passage of extreme temperatures or solar radiation (without depriving of light) ensures living comfort all over the year and at any latitude.

This high level of protection does not exclude flawless aesthetics. Certainly, to obtain an excellent aesthetic performance the glass must be subjected to a suitable cleaning. This implies a good care of the rooms, to avoid the formation of opacity or visible dust. Over time the walk over surface can undergo a process of deterioration caused by scratches, stains and worn areas.

But the wonder of a suspended passage or a kaleidoscopic vision of spaces is worth the effort of a little maintenance, from which, however, no material is totally free.

When, then, the walk over glass surface is supported by solid and refined frames, with innovative technology and are tailor-made according to the technical and aesthetic design requirements, the result can only be excellent.