GANA Members Get Fired Up About Glass Week

Glass Week 2007, sponsored by the Glass Association of North America (GANA), continues at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Fla.

On Monday, the Fire Protection Glass Committee held its first meeting-and, in a sense, its only meeting, as one of the first orders of business was to approve as the new committee name the Fire-Rated Glazing Council. Jerry Razwick of Technical Glass Products was approved as the committee chair.

During its inaugural meeting the group worked to loosely identify its scope and objectives. The group agreed upon a goal of promoting fire safety glazing materials in buildings to an audience that would include the construction industry, the architectural community, code officials, fire fighters and other life safety professionals and the glass industry at large. During the discussion of the scope the group also touched on its intention of developing educational and general promotional materials to provide on the use of fire-rated glazing products and enhance awareness of the benefits of these products. The new committee also aims to provide a forum for the discussion and development of industry standards. Due to time constraints, the group touched on its objectives with the goal of clarifying these over email-as well as concretely defining the scope--to present to committee members for approval at the GANA fall meeting September 12-14 at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta.

This morning the decorative division met to discuss its goals and objectives. Learning more about architects' use of decorative glass was the first question of the division's marketing committee; the committee has developed a survey aimed at gauging the architectural industry's awareness of and interest in decorative glass products. The committee hopes to have the survey fine-tuned for the BEC Conference, March 4-6 in Las Vegas, and to further disseminate at the AIA Conference May 3-5 in San Antonio. Another result of the survey-since the committee anticipated that not every architect would be familiar with all of the choices of decorative glass listed in the survey-was the decision to begin work on a glossary of terms related to decorative glass. The glossary would likely evolve into a project for the decorative glass technical committee, members noted, and someday a reference manual. GANA technical director Greg Carney added that since the association's Glazing Manual was due to be updated for its 50th anniversary in 2008, and presently has no mention of decorative glass, the potential glossary could be used to develop such a section.

The decorative glass marketing committee also expressed its interest in following the lead of GANA's mirror division by initiating a decorative glass design award. A list of further initiatives for the division to look into-from the creation of new glass information bulletins to requests for standards-promise to keep the division members busy until its fall meeting.

Stay tuned to USGNN for daily updates from Glass Week, which finishes on Wednesday.