Saudi American Glass Factory (SAGF) is currently supplying its K-lite Optima multifunctional glass for the curtain-walling, windows and futuristic point-fixed skylighting systems on the Arraya Centre.

The company is extremely pleased and proud to have been selected to supply around 10,000 sq m of its glazing systems for the project.

Its success is just another example of how careful planning and detailed discussions between a project's owners, designers, contractors and key material suppliers can result in the ideal product being selected for buildings.

Saudi American Glass Factory's technical support team worked closely with Gartner Middle East, the aluminium facade subcontractor, to help ensure that the right glass was chosen for the project.

The process of selecting a glass for any particular project has, in recent years, become a lot more critical than just deciding what colour it should be and how much insulation it should provide.

Many glasses can give good thermal insulation while reflecting significant amounts of daylight and solar radiant heat away from a building's facade. However, there is often a price to pay for these benefits.

High levels of external reflection of daylight and solar heat usually mean high levels of internal reflection of light. People within a building - particularly at night when artificial internal lighting is at its highest - see reflections of themselves in the glass instead of the views of the outside that they would like to see.

Saudi billionaire businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the owner of Riyadh's spectacular Kingdom Centre saw this as a major issue when he made his final selection of glass for his project. He wanted to be able to be in his building at night and have an undisturbed view of his country's capital city.

Saudi American Glass Factory developed a very special coating to enable him to do this. The coating on the glass for the project gives an external appearance that is "the talk of the town" while, internally, there are such low levels of reflection that the windows almost appear to have no glass in them at all.

It is this ability to find hi-tech solutions to client's special requirements that has firmly established the company as the Gulf's leading producer of high-performance glass.

This approach of always trying to satisfy customer's needs and to continually look for new innovative products to satisfy ever-changing market trends is the key to Saudi American Glass Factory's continued success.

SAGF was the first company in the Middle East to supply locally-manufactured high-performance sputter-coated glass. It now leads the way in multifunctional and low-emissivity glasses to satisfy the latest trends in architectural design.

The next stage in product development may lie in self-cleaning coated glasses, to enable building owners to depend on nature to clean their glass rather than using expensive maintenance systems to do so, or in the so-called "smart glass" products that can be darkened when bright sunlight causes problems and then lightened again when more daylight is needed.

The future is bright and, as owners of many important projects such as the Arraya Centre have found, contacting Saudi American Glass Factory can result in the right glass being used on their project.