Could a home be built of glass bricks?Would it be energy efficient, and would the glass blocks have the strength to support the outer walls?
no...because glass is actually a supercooled liquid which will eventually collapse on its own weight(i get this info from Discovery channel) and glass will both absorb and reflect heat equally.....so,u would be dying because of the heat during the day...
No, glass block is not designed to bear weight, but it can be used for many other types of things in your home.
I have seen houses with large walls made of glass blocks. They would probably conduct heat and cold so they would be hard to heat and cool. You would have no wall space to hang art works.
your privacy would be in risk =D Further more, it would be hard to get the energy cables inside the walls, fix stuff to the walls and it could be a real danger because of the shards. About the energy efficiency... it would be a bit bad as in summer it would overheat. At winter would be better, because of the greenhouse effect but maybe it has less thermoisolation than concrete, turning it less efficient. xD It's really hard to tell, but if you could control the opacity of the glass, it would definetly be better.
Biggest problem is the cost. Takes a large amount of energy to turn sand into glass which is reflected in the cost. Some glass manufacturers do make glass blocks for building purposes. Thermal conductivity is not remarkable at 1.1 W/(m·K). For instance, Air(still) has a conductivity of 0.025 which would be better (Copper is 401 for comparison). Glass can be formulated to pass or stop selectively almost any band of frequencies so it can, for instance, pass visible light and stop UV and Infrared.
