Performance of the compressed pillar made of solid glass bricks in comparison with other materials

High compressive strength of glass is currently being increasingly used for compressed load-bearing elements such as columns or walls. These structural elements are made in different cross-sections, e.g. rectangle, circular hollow cross-section, cruciform etc. The submitted paper is focused on the experimental analysis of pillar made from solid glass bricks and comparison of its load-bearing capacity with columns made of other materials such as steel, concrete, timber and traditional masonry. The first set of experiments was aimed to verifying of the masonry behavior under compression using two small-scale test specimens. Subsequently, a masonry pillar with a height of 3.0 m was tested till the first failure of glass bricks under compressed load. Finally, a comparison of the load bearing capacity of columns with the similar cross section from different materials was made.