Daylight without the carbon

Daylight is one of the best things a building can offer, and it's expensive in carbon. Float glass is melted at over 1,500 °C. The aluminum frame that carries it is one of the most energy-intensive materials in common use. A curtain wall delivers light and view, but it books a heavy carbon cost to do it — and most of that cost is in the structure around the glass, not the glass itself.

One grown part instead of two smelted ones

Vitralamn collapses the assembly. It is a bio-polymer grown with its lattice held below the wavelength of visible light, so light passes through as if the material were glass — but the same lattice carries structural load, so the panel needs no separate metal frame. One part does the framing and the glazing together, and it's grown from captured carbon at ambient temperature rather than melted.

The carbon in a window was never mostly in the glass. It was in the frame. Vitralamn removes the frame.

What "grown clear" means

Transparency is about scale. When the structural features of a material are larger than a wavelength of light, they scatter it and the material looks white or cloudy. Keep those features small enough and light travels through unscattered. Vitralamn's strength comes from a lattice engineered to sit under that threshold — strong enough to span, fine enough to see through. The brightest grade transmits 82% of visible light, comparable to architectural glass.

Where it goes

Skylights and daylight roofs use the bright Z1 grade; curtain walls and storefronts use the balanced Z2; the load-bearing ZX grade lets glazing span as structure — glass floors and self-supporting roofs with no frame in the way of the view. Choosing between brightness and strength is a real trade-off, and it's a tunable one, which we get into in Tuning translucency.