Every two years, representatives throughout the glass industry gather at the Façade Tectonics Institute (FTI) World Congress to discuss innovation in the art, science and technology of building facades. The event this year runs from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, 2026, in Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture.
Throughout the four-day event, a multitude of sessions and events bring together diverse voices across disciplines for an open dialogue on all aspects of the building skin. Topics ranged from building codes, energy requirements, testing, design challenges, circularity, fabrication, modeling and more.
Incorporating BIPV
One of the main themes of the FTI World Congress 2026 centered on reducing carbon emissions in facades. A session moderated by Sanjeev Tankha of Starq Design explored how façade design can respond to climate challenges through lower embodied carbon and building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) strategies that improve energy performance and occupant comfort.
Jeremy Smith of Exo Surfaces and David Charney of Goody Clancy presented an analysis on how low-carbon façades can marry aesthetics and cost-effectiveness even when designers and fabricators pursue the lowest total carbon outcome. Those facades can also be generative, providing an appealing design with an active energy interface that powers a building, improving thermal comfort and natural ventilation.
Ho Lun Chiang of Gensler says there is no more urgent time than now to incorporate BIPV into buildings, especially in high-energy facilities such as UC Berkeley’s under construction climate-research incubator, Bakar Lab for Energy and Materials.
“Lab buildings consume several times more energy than typical office buildings because of their high air-exchange rates, specialized equipment and controlled environments,” he explains. “They’re also difficult places to incorporate PV because the roof is doing so many things. There’s mechanical equipment, air-handling units, cooling towers and space needed for façade maintenance. That leaves limited roof area.”
Chiang says the Bakar Lab project will integrate BIPV into the façade, roof, mechanical screens and shading devices to make energy generation part of the building’s architecture rather than an afterthought. Project designers selected different BIPV technologies based not only on energy output, but also on transparency, daylighting, thermal comfort and appearance. Together with conventional PV, Chiang says the systems are expected to offset about 8% to 10% of the building’s energy use, depending on weather conditions.
“BIPV isn’t just generating energy,” he notes. “It’s also shaping the everyday experience of the space behind it.”
Circularity and Resilience
Carbon reduction does not end with energy performance. It also requires rethinking how façade materials are manufactured, used and recovered. Sophie Pennetier, founder of Digne, and a panel of circularity experts analyzed how the glass industry can further shift its approach to recycling architectural glass to reduce landfill waste and embodied carbon.
Sydney Mainster, vice president of sustainability and design management at the Durst Organization, notes that 10 million tons of float glass are manufactured in the United States annually, and only 25% is recycled into cullet from pre-consumer sources.
Projects in Europe are finding ways to keep existing glass in use, from adding new lites to older windows to incorporating vacuum insulating glass into historic window systems, says Lisa Rammig, director at Eckersley O’Callaghan. Other efforts are testing whether recovered glass can be certified and reused in new insulating glass units or upgraded to meet modern safety requirements. Similar work is underway in the United States, where a San Francisco project is testing glass removed from existing buildings for potential use in new construction.
Mainster, Pennetier and Rammig note that recycling initiatives and technical know-how in Europe are creeping into the U.S., which they say has helped unlock hundreds of post-consumer glass coming off buildings and diverted from landfills in New York and Los Angeles.
Tracking Building Materials
Rammig says that an area that has not been fleshed out is the use of data systems to better understand the materials in buildings. Germany has a database that identifies building stock and categorizes which buildings might become available for deconstruction, she explains. They have an online map that provides information about what material might become available and when, based on assumptions about the life of those buildings.
She notes that in the U.S, databases do exist that show what materials are available and where materials can be processed. There is a lot of potential there, she adds, because, if you know a building is coming down, you can start figuring out where that material can go.
However, she says the glass industry needs better systems that connect all these things: What material is where? When will it become available? How can we use it? What do we need to know about it? She adds that if we can connect that information, there is a much greater opportunity to reuse glass and other building materials.
Scaling Glass Recovery
Pennetier states that Digne launched the first post-consumer recycling program in California, reaching 300 tons of recovered glass in the second quarter of 2026 with an upcoming additional 100 tons in San Francisco Bay Area in the fourth quarter of 2026. Georgia Oehler of the National Glass Association (NGA) and Pennetier also shared the preliminary findings of an NGA and AEC collaboration study on the recovery of glass and aluminum from a project in Rochester, Minnesota, in collaboration with Infinite Recycled Technologies, assembled by Digne.
Additionally, Samuel Jung presented his phone app during the session. The app was developed during his undergraduate thesis in Los Angeles, stemming from a collaboration between Munich University of Applied Sciences and Digne. The program uses lidar and artificial intelligence for real-time dimensioning of transparent glass for purposes of retrofit request for qualifications or post-consumer glass tonnage assessment. Jung also presented his post-thesis developments on dimensioning punched windows rough openings, in response to feature requests from German window manufacturers for retrofit projects.