Glass Inc. - Reflections 1999-2019

Although Glass, Inc. embraces more than its share of standard glass jobs, Smith explained that the insurance requirements and employee training that comes along with complex commercial, government, and specialized jobs makes it difficult to match pricing with a small company with a small crew op- erating out of the back of a truck. “We look for challenging, difficult jobs that require some kind of innovation, ingenuity, or creative design,” Smith said. Through that process, not only does Glass, Inc. build expertise, but they are usually bidding against a small number of companies capable of completing the job. Memorial Hospital at Gulfport provided one of those challenges. Hurricane-Impact-Rated Unitized Curtain Wall System Memorial Hospital, located on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was originally a brick building completed in the 1950s. The owners wanted to cover the older brick building with a unitized curtain wall system, but it was no ordinary job. First, there was no access from the interior of the building (since there was a solid brick facing the inside of the wall system). Second, when Memorial an- nounced that it wanted the unitized curtain wall system to withstand hurri- cane-force winds, no one in the country had ever completed a hurricane-impact-rated, unitized curtain wall. “So we went to EFCO (one of the leading glass and window manufacturers in the country),” Smith said. “They were pioneers in the hurricane-impact products world. They also had lots of experience with unitized curtain wall systems because of their work with glass shops in the Northeast. So I started talking to them about the possibility of completing and testing a new hurri- cane-impact unitized system that was still in the early design stage.” EFCO bought into Smith’s concept. EFCO designed a completely new sys- tem, spent a year going through all the testing and government regulations, and created a structure that passed all the tests with flying colors. “When the Memorial job came up for bid,” Smith said, “we used EFCO’s system and won the project over two of the bigger glass companies in the country.” Embracing a Challenge; Learning Curve “That’s when the real learning started on our end,” Smith said. Unitized curtain wall systems utilize a specfic set of tools for snapping the Glass, Inc. took a risk on a small job in Scooba, Mississippi. That risk led to the landmark project in Century Link’s Monroe facility. CENTURYLINKCORPORATEHEADQUARTERS MONROE, LOUISIANA 124