A soap bubble just floating over the ground” is young Italian engineer Lucio Blandini's description for his potentially revolutionary design for an entirely frameless glass structure. Blandini designed the project while a doctoral student at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Lightweight Structures, founded in 1964 by Frei Otto. Since 1995, the institute has been under the direction of Werner Sobek, the noted German engineer who has done pioneering research on glass, including the development of carbon-fiber reinforced glass and load-bearing glass structures.