This Manhattan Penthouse enjoys luxiourious views of New York city’s skyline viewed, through high-performance, Saint Gobain insulated LowE glass windows. Insulated glass units as large as 126″ x 236″, have been heat treated with demanding optical acuity.

This Harrison Street penthouse used Sky-Frame‘s narrow sightline framing system. Click here to view more pictures of this project.

Heat Treatment

In order to provide greater resistance to thermal, mechanical stresses, and achieve specific break patterns for safety glazing applications, annealed float glass can be subjected to a heat treating process.

Fully Tempered

Tempered or toughened [UK] glass is a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal treatments. It is four times stronger than annealed glass. Tempering shrinks the faces of the glass thus putting the outer surfaces into compression and the inner surfaces into tension.
This imprisoned energy causes the glass, when broken, to shatter into small, granular chunks instead of splintering into jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.

Heat Strengthened Glass

Heat Strengthened Glass is produced with surface compression levels less than fully tempered glass. These lower compression levels yield a product that is generally twice as strong as annealed glass of the same thickness, size and type. Heat Strengthened Glass will fracture into
large fragments, similar to annealed glass breakage but without the star/shard pattern. With its unique furnace configuration, AGNORA can HS up to 12 mm thick uncoated glass and 10 mm coated glass. Monolithic HS glass is not a safety glass.

AGNORA is certified by the Safety Glass Certification Council (SGCC) and are uniquely able to heat-strengthen 12mm glass.