Modern facades, whether made of glass or including transparent, translucent or reflective elements, let through a particular light spectrum or change its intensity in many different ways. “Filtering facades” may change the image seen through them or change the colour of passing light according to specific circumstances: the angle of observation or temperature. These indicated properties of facades acting as “filters” were made...

The paper deals with the architecture of contemporary buildings in respect to their aesthetic image created by the use of natural light. Sustainability is regarded as a principle of contemporary architecture, where daylighting is an important factor as it affects energy consumption and environmental quality of the space inside a building. Environmental awareness of architecture, however, involves a much wider and more holistic...

Recent increasing demand for new eco-friendly materials and for low cost fabrication process for use in optical sensors field, raise concern about alternative materials for this application. We have designed two glass-ceramics compositions from the quaternary ROAl2O3- SiO2-B2O3(R=Ba) alkali-earth aluminum silicate system, labeled B72 and B69, with high refractive index (>1.6), large values of Abbe number (94.0 and 53.0, respectively),...

Nanodiamond integration with optical fibers has proved a compelling methodology for magneto-optics. We reveal that the applicability of nanodiamonds in nonlinear optics goes beyond the previous demonstrations of frequency converters. Instead, we exploit the recently reported volumetric integration of nanodiamonds along the optical fiber core and show that the nonlinear response of glasses can be manipulated by nanodiamonds. By...