Ponderings on pretty panes in pre-Ike Dallas

I rode the same shuttle bus as Arthur Berkowitz and James Carroll of J.E. Berkowitz on my way to the Wyndham DFW Airport North Hotel last week. I flew into Dallas for the GANA Fall Conference Sept. 8-10. As the pre-Ike rain started pattering down and our bus picked up speed on the empty highway, we started chatting about ...what else? ... the state of the industry, latest projects and the hot products on the market. Berkowitz mentioned the Dulles International Airport project and the company’s latest product, decorative interlayers with SentryGlas Expressions from DuPont.

SentryGlas is a specific technology that uses an inkjet printer to print on to the PVB, Carroll said. The special ink is made by DuPont in conjunction with the makers of the printer. The surface of the SentryGlas PVB is ground differently than regular PVBs, he said. “If it’s too flat, the ink will run off. This PVB is specially prepared for ink adhesion; it allows the ink to stay where you put it.”

The technology allows you to take a picture and recreate it in a special software package. You can make the image larger or smaller. “You can do just about anything with this,” Carroll said. “We’re using Photoshop to maneuver the files.” You can put silk-screen patterns and put it in the PVB instead of the lami. You can pick any color you like. “The advantage is you can do this in different pieces and put them together to make one image,” Carroll said. “We’ve seen people looking into having their names printed on the building. It’s better to print on the interlayer than to silk-screen it on the outside of the glass.”

Berkowitz is a licensed dealer of the DuPont technology and is trying to market it as a Berkowitz/DuPont product. Other than Berkowitz, Pulp Studio in Los Angeles and Standard Bent in Butler, Pa., also are marketing SentryGlas in North America, Carroll said. “We’ve had it for about four months,” he said. “We have just now have begun to make samples and send them out. We’re working with a graphic designer as a contract employee. It’s very time consuming, depending upon how complicated the design is. We’re waiting for the dam to break.”

As the bus pulled into the hotel driveway, the rain drops were coming down big and fast. We jogged inside, and Berkowitz commented that there are no “standards” anymore in decorative glass. Architects want larger sizes and everything is customized, he said. True to the market trends, GANA began its decorative division in 2006. Read about a decorative presentation at the fall conference.

What are some of your hot products waiting to take off in the market? Drop me a line and tell me about projects using innovative and unusual glass.

By Sahely Mukerji, news editor/managing editor, Glass Magazine