In 1999 Mike Skura, vice president of architectural design at CTEK, a company that specializes in prototype glass for cars and airplanes, was startled by a phone call from architect Frank Gehry. "He said he had searched high and low for someone to do complex, compound curved glass," recalls Skura, "and wanted to know if we could do it." They had to try, of course. Skura broke a lot of glass struggling to bend large sheets into the tight curves of the Gehry-designed, glass-enclosed cafeteria in the Condé Nast headquarters in New York, but the eventual success solidified a partnership between Skura and Gehry and their separate industries. After that, CTEK got so many calls from architects for glass projects that it introduced a separate architectural division to accommodate the huge demand for complex, curved architectural safety glass.
By searching outside the confines of standard construction-industry methods and materials to find a business that supplies the automotive and aerospace industries, Gehry engaged in what is called technology transfer—simply the movement of processes or materials from one industry to another. (Of course, he had already made that leap with his much-publicized adaptation of CATIA—aerospace design software—to help rationalize the exotic geometries of his buildings.)
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