I recently saw an article about a section of a building where the walls, ceiling and floor were all made of glass. This was fairly striking it itself – though for the more faint-hearted among us (me included) perhaps also slightly scary – but what particularly struck me was that this feat is part of a wider movement of artists, engineers and architects who are pushing the boundaries of what we thought we could do with glass. If you’ve ever been inside an Apple store, you’ll probably have noticed the transparent steps that lead up to the next level, climbed by hundreds of people every day. They aren’t plastic. They’re glass.

There are more possibilities than most people imagine contained in the world of glass, though artists are beginning to explore the potential of the medium – which you can see by taking a look at [...]