The article deals with preliminary information on design of prestressed cable-nets supporting large glass façades. Described are façade components and examples of prominent realized façades. In the survey of primary publications the trend of experimental and theoretical approaches concerning design problems of these structures is presented (securing of necessary stiffness and load capacity, danger of a glass-cable-net connection failure, failure of anchors or loss of prestressing, dynamic behaviour during failures, blasts and earthquakes, temperature effects). In more details are described publications used in the follow-up Part [31] for validation and verification of the own numerical analysis and parametric studies of these façades.