Pressed sheet glass of the early twentieth century in St. Petersburg architecture

In the buildings of the old fund of St. Petersburg, there are window sashes filled with not ordinary colorless glass, but with special ones, with relief patterns on the surface. They can be colorless or colored - green, yellow, blue, blue, pink, orange ... Such windows are sometimes called stained-glass windows, which is not true. The use of colored or colorless decorative glass for filling sections of window frames is called decorative glazing.

When we started the project for the inventory of stained-glass windows in St. Petersburg, we did not expect that there would be so many windows with such glass. The understanding came that these glasses in themselves are a subject for study, and in combination with original genuine frames, often with figured or geometric deviations, they form an organic part of the staircase interior design.

Such glasses were also used for stained-glass windows, textured fragments successfully complemented colored patterns, somewhere they imitated the surface of water or the roughness of foliage, somewhere they stood out with a border, delimiting the main image from the window frame.

During the year of work in Vasileostrovsky and Petrogradsky districts, we counted about 30 types of textured glass in St. Petersburg windows. This result is not yet final. Some of the glasses managed to be named with historical names - they are found in the catalogs of foreign glass manufacturers. Unfortunately, no price lists or catalogs of Russian glass factories with a list of such "patterned" glass have yet been found.

In the book about stained-glass windows in the Petrogradskiy region, all these glasses are presented with names and photographs.

The publication is distributed by pre-order