Fire rated glass floors and ceilings offer great creative potential
Promat SYSTEMGLAS® fire resistant glazing systems enable architects and developers to maximise natural light within buildings by using glass in separating floors and ceilings.
Glass floors have become an increasingly attractive design option as glass composition and manufacturing has evolved over recent decades, ensuring that the demanding structural performance required for load-bearing applications can be accommodated in more types of projects. This provides the opportunity to use glass to allow light to flow between the floors of a building, or even from the street level above, making glass floors particularly appealing where daylighting is sought in basement levels, or in rooms where there is limited or zero potential for external windows.
In addition to being able to support high loads, however, walk-on glass floors must also offer an assured level of fire resistance. The glass specification must prevent fire spreading between the floors of a building and ensure it retains its integrity when subjected to intense heat and flames to prevent catastrophic failure.
Promat offers a glass floor solution that meets all the requirements for commercial and public buildings, as well as high end residential properties, with its SYSTEMGLAS Stratum solution. This is a walk-on load-bearing glass floor that has been designed and tested as a complete system – the glass, framing, seals and all other components – to provide integrity and insulation (EI) fire resistance of either 30 or 60 minutes.
The system is ideally suited to contemporary buildings as several recently completed projects in the Czech Republic illustrate. At the Šumperk Town Hall, SYSTEMGLAS was used to provide walkable glazing on multiple floors of the building to access a passenger lift. This helped to ensure the availability of natural light could be maintained at a high level in the building’s communal areas, whilst also complementing the glass lift for aesthetic consistency.
In another public building project, a walk-on glass floor was incorporated as part of a refurbishment at the Eden Center for Green Technologies in Czechia to add an interesting visual feature. This forms a triangular shape to match the floor as it narrows to a point in the centre’s Eco-pavilion building, complete with a non-slip top layer to maintain safety.
This project shows the versatility of Promat SYSTEMGLAS® in terms of how it can provide a way to create glass floors with more unusual shapes. This is also shown in a project at the Eggenberg Brewery Český Krumlov in southern Czechia, where a round fire-rated glass floor was created by Promat to allow more daylight into a spiral staircase and provide an interesting aesthetic feature.
Equally eye-catching are the walk-on glass floors created using SYSTEMGLAS at the Amadeus Liberec Shopping Centre. Here, a walk-on glass floor was incorporated to enhance the aesthetics of the public areas and allow light transmission to flow more easily between the floors of the building.
A structural glass floor featuring fire resistant glazing with integrity and insulation protection (EI) proved to be the ideal solution, given its ability to accommodate high footfall. Patterned and non-slip glass was also specified to meet aesthetic and safety objectives.
Walk-on structural glass floors, however, are not just limited to relatively small design features. In another project at the Military History Institute in Prague, a much larger walkable glass floor was installed using Promat SYSTEMGLAS® in a project to reconstruct an area of the building which houses a Czech resistance memorial.
Here, Promat was tasked with providing a structural floor measuring approximately 5m x 6m. This was created using a load-bearing fire resistant glass with a 57mm thickness in combination with a layer of extra clear glass and a slip-resistant top layer.
The glass was installed into framing created using a steel structure clad on the underside with PROMATECT-H®, Promat’s calcium silicate-based material which is highly resistant to fire. The overall result in this application was to create a walk-on glass floor that provides EI45 integrity and insulation protection for 45 minutes.
