Glass, just glass-no textures, no colors, no patterns-has always been a popular building material for architectural designs and details. Depending upon the design, flat, clear glass alone can be stunning. And then there’s decorative glass, which can offer those extra details … the textures, colors and patterns … that allows for a design that can really stand out.

While it may seem as though interior applications, rather than exterior, are the ones that take advantage of all that decorative glass can offer, it’s not to say that a building façade can’t also be decorative. As just an example, printing technologies are now available that can ink-jet or digitally print amazingly detailed graphics right onto glass; the same can be done to interlayer materials when the job calls for laminated glass.

Likewise, the design of the building itself can make for a relatively decorative façade. Consider the 632-meter Shanghai Tower, designed by Gensler, that is currently being built in China.

A Gensler press release describes the tower as “nine cylindrical buildings stacked one atop another. The inner layer of the double-skin façade encloses the stacked buildings, while a triangular exterior layer creates the second skin, or building envelope, which gently rotates as it rises. The spaces between the two façade layers create nine atrium sky gardens.”

Maybe it’s just me, but words such as “cylindrical,” “triangular” and “gently rotates” have somewhat of a decorative flare.

To create the look of the building, Gensler used “warped” glass panels, which had only a slight curve or bend, and aligned them so that the building appears to wrap all the way to the top.

And on another note, decorative exteriors can also make for “green applications. The Shanghai Tower, for instance, is an example of sustainable design. Among a list of sustainable qualities, the tower’s circular inner glass skin, for example, uses 14 percent less glass than a square building of the same area, and minimizes energy consumption. Also, the double-skin façade’s vertical atria creates thermal buffer zones.

Gensler says owners of the Shanghai Tower plan to register for a high level of building certification from the China Green Building Committee and the U.S. Green Building Council.

CLICK HERE to read more about Shanghai Tower and to view Gensler’s conceptual animation (on page 7) of the project.