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Five of us from the office attended the Glass Performance Days conference in Finland this June. GPD is held every two years in Tampere, and in our opinion the best conference in glass engineering. Speakers come from glass manufacturing and processing background as well as facade engineers and architects, talking about glass for 4 days. 

The first two days of the conference is workshops, and we gave an "Introduction to Facade Engineering" half day workshop, mainly focused on system development for high-rise buildings from the design aspects (since that's what we are really good at). It was very well attended mostly by glass industry professionals and structural engineers.

As part of the conference programme, Agnes gave a case study presentation on our Opus project - this freeform Zaha Hadid building brought many challenges in design and procurement and definitely pushed the limits of the industry in many ways. The paper is available in the proceedings book, can be ordered from the GPD website.

After the conference, we rented a minivan and spent the weekend traveling a bit in Finland. We were trying saunas, staying at a farm, visiting castles and old towns, the homes of Alvar Alto and Eero Saarinen; and went rowing on a lake under the midnight Sun. Glass conferences are fun :)