Abuhashem framed the talk around three things a modern glass façade has to reconcile: performance, solar control and daylight together, bird-friendly design, and the digital tools that help an architect specify the right glass.

The bird-friendly thread was the one he expected to be new to some in the field. Bird-to-window collision is a genuine global problem: birds see the reflected sky, trees or surrounding scenery, or read a transparent pane as an open path. As façades get more transparent and more reflective, it only grows, and in the UAE and the wider Middle East it matters specifically, because the region sits on bird migration routes. Biodiversity, he argued, now belongs in the façade conversation alongside aesthetics and performance.

He spent time clearing up misconceptions. Collisions are not just a big-city problem, they happen wherever there is reflection, urban, suburban or low-rise. There is no single solution that suits every project; location and lighting make each one unique. And a lone hawk sticker does almost nothing, what works is a pattern carried across the whole surface, where even a modest 2×2 dot pattern applied as decals can be highly effective.

On raw performance, he pointed to Guardian’s coated products, a coated glass such as SN Grey 50T that pairs abundant daylight with solar protection and high selectivity across fully glazed façades and roof glazing, and to Guardian Clarity, an anti-reflective glass that cuts reflection from around 8% to just 0.7% and lifts light transmission from 90% to 98%, for an almost obstruction-free view.

The last thread was digital. Guardian’s AI assistant, CLARIA, is pitched at exactly the specifying problem: given enough context, it helps with product recommendations, performance calculations, visualisations and compliance information, with guided prompt templates to get the most from it. High-performance glass, in Abuhashem’s framing, is no longer just the numbers on a spec sheet, it is daylight, wildlife and the tools that tie them together.