The Beauty of Nothing

With technology derived from watchmaking, Vitrocsa’s structural glass systems help architects inch closer to the Modernist vision of invisible walls.

- Janelle Zara

Swiss entrepreneur Eric Joray had never seen Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House in person, but its image was firmly planted in his imagination. With its transparent floor-to ceiling walls, it represented the paradigm of lightness that Southern California’s airy Modernism seemed to embody—although not without its drawbacks. “Don’t build a glass house if you’re worried about saving money on heating,” Philip Johnson, creator of perhaps the most iconic glass house of all, famously said.

In 1993, wanting to re-create California Modernism in the vastly different climate of his native Switzerland, Joray launched Vitrocsa, a glass curtain wall system that has become a favorite among high-profile architects for luxury residential projects, including forthcoming Manhattan high rises by David Chipperfield, Isay Weinfeld, and Richard Meier. His goal had been both to realize the Modernist ideals of dissolving barriers between interior and exterior, and to provide thorough protection against the elements.

“Those single-glazed sliding doors— there’s no way they could do that in Switzerland,” says Vitrocsa USA CEO James Tschortner, who cofounded the company’s American headquarters in Los Angeles in 2009 (and took Joray to finally see the Stahl House in 2013). Midcentury glass houses were notoriously fragile, unsafe, and ill suited for climate control. But as a former maker of luxury Swiss watch components as well as an avid orchid cultivator, Joray combined his expertise in both high-precision manufacturing and greenhouses to create a new dual-glazing method that would surmount these obstacles. Floating the glass to cool on a bath of molten tin, for example, relieves it of its internal tensions and gives it greater resilience.