Ransom Center's treasures captured on sandblasted glass walls; The following glass and glazing products have been cast, sandblasted, glazed, and transformed by various other forms of artistry and engineering to create the right design or function required by specifiers. Many of these products are a response to economic, energy-efficiency, and/or building-code issues that concern today's architects and designers.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin houses 30 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. For the center's recently completed renovation, San Antonio-based Lake/Flato Architects transposed some of the collection's instantly recognizable images onto a three-sided glass wall entrance. This accomplished two goals--to help bring natural light into what had previously been a dark and uninviting interior, and to further promote Harry Ransom's goal to make the collection available to the public for research. Lake/Flato worked with Austin graphic design firm fd2s Inc. and Chicago-based glass fabricators Skyline Design to transform the center's digital collection of photos, text, and film images into a 12,000-square-foot glass display. For the project, Skyline used Photo Glass, a proprietary process that pixelates an image that can be sandblasted onto any thickness of glass--in this case a 1/4" piece of tempered glass on the inside of a 1" insulated-glass unit.