George Sergiou of Glass & Facades, defined façade engineering not by the textbook but by a harder standard, learning to see through the architect’s eye, then doing whatever it takes to make what they see actually exist.
He opened with the definition everyone knows: façade engineering as the art and science of resolving aesthetic, environmental and structural issues to achieve the effective enclosure of buildings, structural engineering, architecture and building physics in one discipline.
But that, he argued, isn’t really what the job is. For Sergiou it is where vision meets reality: learning to see through the architect’s eye, and then doing whatever it takes to make what they see actually exist. That is the whole of it.
The proof was a portfolio, and it doubles as a short history of Cyprus going tall. Glass & Facades has engineered the envelopes of Metropolitan (66 m) and City of Dreams Mediterranean (80 m), Nice Dream (65 m), Marco Polo and Symbol (both 50 m), Wall Street (27 m) and Ararat (95 m), Dream Tower at 120 m, the MSC Shipping headquarters, The Edge, Portgate (72 m) and the Cyprus University of Technology, among others, a run of towers delivered across just a few years.
Running under the list was the practice’s actual role: bridging architects and contractors, translating design intent into buildable systems, and making ambitious ideas perform in the specific conditions of the Cypriot market.