14 October 2025
“Glass is not nothing” is a project by architect Laura van Santen, in collaboration with 10 architects, designers and artists. Together with them, and in partnership with TU Delft and Make Eindhoven, she explores the potential of glass prisms in the worlds of architecture and construction. It’s a remarkable project that looks back a 100 years in order to shape the future of glass in architecture. “Glass is not nothing” is on view during Dutch Design Week as part of Make’s exhibition REMEMBER | RETAKE.
Written by Pleuni van Keulen
The odd one out
Laura van Santen describes herself as the odd one out at Make. After all, she’s an architect – while workshops are usually populated by artists and designers. Yet her project “Glass is not nothing” shows just how at home she is here.
She explains: “When I started, I was fascinated by everything to do with lenses and prismatic qualities – glass that refracts and scatters light. Glass is such a beautiful, fascinating and complex material, but architects hardly ever use it (other than for windows). It’s also an incredibly costly material. At the same time, as architects we draw a few lines on paper and there are your windows – without thinking about how much energy it takes to produce them.”
Text continues below images
Bringing back old techniques
Laura:“A 100 years ago, we treated glass very differently. Energy was precious then – and it is again now. So maybe we can bring back some of those glassmaking techniques.”She’s referring to prism glass: a material designed to draw light deep into a space and scatter it evenly. Glass prisms were used as early as the late seventeenth century in shipbuilding, allowing light below deck without the need for open flames. In the nineteenth century, prisms found their way onto land, used to brighten spaces with little daylight.
The potential of reused glass
Laura:“Working with prism glass offers an intelligent way of using light – one I believe we should reintroduce into architecture. That’s why I invited 10 architects, artists and designers to create their own designs. I first started working with TU Delft, who were already researching the potential of glass reuse. That’s important, because we need to address our throwaway culture. We keep on producing, and pollution keeps growing. You can see that biobased building is gaining ground, but glass is still left out of the conversation. That awareness really needs to grow.”
Linking waste streams to prisms
Sand – the raw material for glass – is extracted from rivers or sand quarries, often at the expense of local ecosystems. It’s also a non-renewable resource, becoming increasingly scarce. Laura explains what drives her: “How can I link waste streams to prisms and make use of those optical qualities? And why are we so afraid of colour? You actually have to add a lot of material to glass to make it transparent. In my initial research, I experimented with prism shapes and tested sheet glass and bottle glass. I brought that research – along with the small test pieces – to the Make workshop, together with the 10 others. There we look at what’s practically achievable: what’s possible, for instance, with reused car glass or TV glass. The goal is to develop real, functional products. We’re now preparing to make larger moulds for larger-scale tests. And in the meantime, I hope others will find this interesting enough to join in.”
“Glass is not nothing” features 10 projects by Civic, Jeanette Slütter, Werkstatt, Mio Fujimaki, Bright, Bureau SLA, Studio C.A.R.E., Marlies Boterman, Studio Acte and Bo Stokkermans.
See their work at the Make exhibition REMEMBER | RETAKE during Dutch Design Week, from 18 to 26 October.
Fotografie: Luuk Kramer and Jeannette Slütter