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A 30-foot-long glass bridge blends ancient wisdom with cutting-edge design

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Masoud Akbarzadeh's Glass Bridge is a 30-foot-long structure made entirely of glass.

The structure uses hollow glass units to build a super-efficient structure that harnesses glass's strength.

It took six years of planning, drafting, revising, and negotiating with vendors to get the blueprints ready.

Akbarzadeh extended the methods of graphic statics from two dimensions to three , expanding Rankine 's 1864 proposition.

He and his team designed the bridge's geometry to channel forces along ideal compression paths.

Every glass unit, joint, and angle was optimized so that the arch would carry the load primarily through compression rather than bending forces.

University of Pennsylvania's glass bridge is a shimmering arch of glass, delicate in appearance but solid in structure.

Each hollow glass unit had to fit perfectly with its neighbors, and the tolerance for error was a mere 0.1 millimeters of accuracy.

The final days of construction were particularly tense; any error would compromise the structural integrity.