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Top Glass west 2024

Toronto has had all the fun long enough. For the first time, Canada’s favourite trade event for the architectural glass and glazing industry will take place Oct. 17 at the Best Western Premier Calgary Plaza Hotel and Conference Centre. Plus, on Oct. 16, Top Glass West will host tours of Oldcastle Building Envelope’s 72nd Ave SE fabrication facility where attendees can see how architectural windows, curtainwall, entrances and storefront are made. Space is limited so register today!

Four education sessions will cover the hot industry topics of the day. Top Glass sessions are recognized by most professional organizations as eligible for structured learning credits, so architects and engineers can pick up the credits they need to maintain certification. Attendance certificates are provided. 

Registration for Top Glass West is free courtesy of Canada’s top commercial glass and glazing suppliers. Visit over 20 exhibitors on our bustling show floor. 

Top Glass West is proud of our support from Canada’s national and regional industry associations. Say hi to your friends from PGAA, GAMA, Fenestration Canada and FGIA at Top Glass West. 

Let’s get together. See you at Top Glass!

Top Glass West Schedule

October 16
TOUR OF OLDCASTLE BUILDING ENVELOPE 

Time: Ongoing throughout the day

Tour the Calgary location of one of the world’s largest architectural glazing fabricators, Oldcastle Building Envelope. Attendees will see architectural windows, curtainwall, entrances and storefront being manufactured and get all their questions answered by Oldcastle’s production experts. Space is limited so register today!

October 17
9:00 Show opens

10:00 Office to Residential Conversions: The challenge for glaziers
Presenter: PGAA

COVID has had at least one lasting effect on the architectural glass industry: a seemingly permanent reduction in demand for commercial real estate. Working from home is the new normal in dozens of industries that used to populate office towers, leaving building owners with vacancies that will take years of natural demand growth to fill. Rather than wait, some have decided to convert their commercial space into residential apartments and condominiums. Some of these don’t require changes to the facade but some do. In this presentation, hear from experts who have executed these projects and the special challenges and considerations they faced.

11:15 Emerging Technologies in Glass
Presenter: Amy Roberts, FGIA

Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to glass as a building material. But in fact, innovation is charging ahead in the architectural glass space creating exciting possibilities for the future – especially in the areas of thermal performance and embodied carbon. Amy Roberts, FGIA Director of Canadian and Technical Glass Operations, takes the stage at Top Glass West to tell us about vacuum insulating glass, photovoltaics, aerogel IG fill, dynamic glass, thin glass, composite panels, ransparent bamboo and concrete, smart glass and low carbon glass.

12:15 Lunch break

1:15 WHO PROFITS?: Lifting the burden of whole-building performance commissioning
Presenter: Anton Van Dyk, Layton Consulting

The world of low-carbon building construction is moving inexorably toward whole-building performance commissioning where projects will be evaluated and approved based on their overall carbon impact rather than the cobbled-together operational and embodied contributions of their individual parts. This means that, before they even generate a quote, glazing contractors have significant work to do to verify their products’ performance in a particular building detail. Worse, changes made to any other part of the building could send the glazier back to the drawing board to make upgrades or downgrades to their product in midstream. Anton Van Dyk of Layton Consulting has seen how this works to kick the can of performance verification down the chain to contractors and has some ideas for how this system could work better for all concerned.

2:30 Size Shouldn’t Matter, But It Does: New work to standardize thermal performance data for fenestration without defined assembly sizes
Presenter: Terry Adamson, Fenestration Canada

Establishing and certifying the thermal performance of a particular fenestration detail can be a thorn in the side of all concerned. Test data for units and mock-ups obtained at model size can be challenged when different sizes or designs are specified, necessitating new testing that adds cost and time to projects. Certified thermal results can be invalidated with size or design changes that can result in significantly different thermal performance. Industry stakeholders across the continent are looking at ways to model thermal performance across a range of detail sizes using software tools that can provide acceptable results for the specifiers. Fenestration Canada is part of those discussions and Terry Adamson, FenCan’s Technical Director, will give us the inside scoop.

4:00 Show ends