Curved Glass and decoration, here’s how to make safe glass balustrades

Dec 10, 2019

The real protagonist of interior and outdoor furniture in recent years?

Glass, which is increasingly used for internal and external parapets for private homes and public buildings.

The search for a durable solution with maintenance that was not excessively pretentious had led industry experts to choose iron, stainless steel, aluminum and wood as building materials.

The current need to create bright environments has led most interior designers to choose glass for balcony railings, building walls and interior staircases.

The possibility of buying self-cleaning solutions has finally solved the doubts of the last skeptics, convinced until recently that glass maintenance was far more complicated.

How to combine aesthetics and safety in the construction of glass interior railings

In the design phase, in addition to the aesthetic factor, it is very important to develop a solution that is both safe and design: to achieve both objectives, it is advisable to turn to professionals with a certain level of experience.

But what is the safest glass type for the construction of parapets?

Taking into consideration the strength and the type of structure of the glass parapet it is possibile to identify three different levels of security.

The first level refers to that interior glass parapets where the structure does not require the installation of a support, a handrail or other: the only material used is glass.

The second level instead contains all those structures where in addition to the glass we find a handrail: this solution will certainly be more stable and secure than the previous one.

Finally, the third level is the one where we find both the supporting structure and the handrail that make the glass stable over several points and ensure the highest level of safety.

The use of tempered glass in the building and interior furnishing sector

Tempered glass is also widely used in the construction of glass balustrades and other interior structures where we are constantly looking for solutions with a high level of safety.

The hardening process makes the sheets robust, particularly resistant to shocks and thermal stresses and guarantees, in case of glass breakage, maximum safety as the slab shatters into very small pieces without sharp edges.

The tempered glass is thus used, as well as for the construction of external parapets, for doors, partition walls, doors for shower enclosures and for furnishing elements of other rooms in the home such as kitchens.

Monolithic or stratified, here are the safest types of glass

Safety factor and normative factor allow us to identify different types of glass that are used in the construction of parapets: monolithic glass and laminated glass.

Both the monolithic and the stratified glass can be subjected or not to the tempering process: this further distinction allows us to distinguish between tempered monolithic glass, non-tempered monolithic glass, tempered laminated glass and non-tempered laminated glass.

The monolithic glass is usually not recommended for the construction of balconies and internal parapets because it is not able to guarantee the safety levels required by the legislation even if subjected to the tempering process which makes it 4 times more resistant than the untreated version.

As for the laminated glass we must distinguish between:

  1. laminated glass with 2 non-tempered slabs, usually recommended when the structure made of glass and aluminum complies with the UNI 11678 standard of 2017;
  2. laminated glass with 2 tempered sheets, the most used type of glass that allows you to enjoy the same advantages as solutions with a higher thickness depending on the intended use;
  3. laminated glass with 3 tempered slabs, used during the construction of large buildings such as stadiums and other structures that must accommodate large numbers of people simultaneously.

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