Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

> Having worked in an all-glass tower and also a "normal" office building, my personal experience is that the natural light that giant windows let in and the external views that they afford are both phenomenal improvements to the atmosphere. It's really a much more pleasant environment to work in. The only catch is that the interior or window treatment design needs to consider glare from sunlight directly hitting computer screens and/or eyes.

having worked in both well designed and poorly designed glass towers, I can say this: I personally appreciate a well-designed not-glass-waterfall. Being in Seattle, a lot of new towers have gone up that are just sheet glass panels. I've worked in various towers in Seattle and I've come to prefer some of the older style ones. The oldest of them do have issues with light, I'll fully agree with that. There is a difference between that and the absolutely insane floor to ceiling glass panels that make up some of these offices.

Glass towers just... They make monkey brain go scream on the inside and they're just aesthetically displeasing on the outside. They all look alike at one level and become hard to distinguish from one another. I hate walking through Downtown Seattle trying to remember which of the badjillion glass monoliths is the one I want -- unless I'm looking for one of the more unique buildings that is steepled brick and granite.

Another catch is heat management in summer (and much of spring and autumn). The problem gets dramatically worse closer to the equator, of course.

I love the natural light of a glass structure, but with the abundance of high-quality LED light (for a price, naturally) and ways of channeling natural light I wonder how modern architects would reimagine more traditional closed-in highrises.

This is a major annoyance for me with Apple laptops for work: I don't think they typically offer anti-glare screens. The glossy screens obviously look pretty, but an uglier display with anti-glare coating can be a lot better in some conditions even with a less bright screen. At least it's fairly easy to solve at a desk, since you can just use an external monitor.

I worked in a 1920's Beaux-Arts office building. The windows were maybe 2/3rds the height of the walls, but they opened! It was awesome to swing them out and hear the city and get some fresh air.

On a high rise office, the glare problem you mentioned is normally solved by the Interior Designers, curtains blinds, desk design and the like.

The nano texture in my new macbook pro is game changer for these specific situation. It came out a few years back but I only got to replace my laptop recently and it works great. That said, it only works that don't mind the black contrast change.

Side note, it would be interesting to work somewhere where you had to go up 50/100 floors before you got to your place. Maybe some floors are food and you just live in this building for the day till you go home. I used to work in a 10 story building and remember cramming in that elevator every morning.

Yeah, when I was working in Boston my company once moved from an early-20th-century masonry building to a late-20th-century glass box, and in terms of office quality-of-life it was a colossal upgrade: more light, the space was more open, the temperature was more comfortable, etc. No way would I go back. I do sympathize with all the griping about contemporary architecture (especially as a former Boston resident, where the local city offices are an architectural crime against humanity), but buildings need to be lived and worked in, not just admired from the outside for nostalgia's sake.

For a developer capital costs are the main factor, as operational and maintenance costs are passed to the tenant. With glass technology improving, the solar radiation component onto the HVAC system is now not much different from a traditional façade. After all there is no roof heat gains, other than on the top floors and maybe partially on some others. For the most part of a floor the heat gains for HVAC is lights, equipment, people and the cost of cooling the fresh air. People also add to that load. On the civil side, glass facades enable thinner floor slabs with the gain normally of some extra floors. I have been involved with many high rise buildings and they are highly complex beasts to get right everything, especially the costs. With flat slabs one can cast a floor on average every 7 days.

> is this a case of operational costs being ignored in favor of capital costs?

It’s driven by demand for “office spaces with high levels of daylight” [1].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

> Or is this a case of operational costs being ignored in favor of capital costs?

I would lean more towards this.

Because big windows cause solar gain in the summer, and you have huge losses of heat in the winter in more northern climates: even the absolute best windows maybe reach R-8 (U 0.125), while even sucky walls probably get R 20 or better (U 0.05).

>I guess the cost of having to install and run AC is dwarfed by the savings in construction costs?

No, otherwise warehouses would be made of glass and steel (they aren't).

But humans prefer natural light when they can get it.

The article has a chart that compares the total costs between the two types of walls. There's a column for "capitalized heat loss", which presumably factors in the HVAC costs. The article also specifically says

>The most obvious was cost. A glass and metal curtain wall wasn’t necessarily all that much cheaper than one made of brick in terms of the materials themselves, but it was much thinner and lighter. Its thinness meant that for two equally sized floor plates, the curtain wall framed one would have more rentable square feet than the stone or brick one. This more than made up for the fact that the thin curtain walls had worse insulation and were more expensive to heat and cool than masonry walls.

I'd assume they're going to install AC anyway, because who wants to be in NYC in the summer without it.

So the extra utility of big views etc outweighs running the AC a bit more.

My understanding is that double and triple panes are an attempt to mitigate this.

Good lights are not expensive (these days with LEDs, 20 years ago things were different) and can give you as much light as you want. And you can arrange them so there isn't glare at whatever of day the sun would shine in. There are many spaces - even inside these sky scrappers without much natural light. The bosses' corner office gets it, but the others with inside offices don't get much light.

  ...what is 8 weeks?

Buildings can last centuries or even millennia. Whether spending the extra on that build quality is worth it, especially in a post atomic bomb world, is an exercise left to the reader.

Interestingly that can be said for offices at all. Offloading office space and occupancy expenses to employees through “bring your own office” min/max’es office space out of the equation. Sadly in business power over labor is often more important than economics, hence RTO is still a thing. The interesting question will be how long taking a structurally disadvantaged position can last, and will it be long enough for us to figure out techniques for turning these glass boxes into useful space.

Very few people would choose nicer exterior over a better interior. Do you really have enough space in your house? In my observation until you get to around 3000 square feet more is better - only after you hit about that size to houses start featuring more decoration as opposed to just more space. This is a reflection on how people live, that is space for everyone to lives together for their hobbies, entertainment, eating, bathing, and other needs/wants. Of course everyone is different, but that seems to be about right. If you don't have enough space you need to compromise on something and decorations you never see are first.

The above is about homes - offices will of course have different needs.

>ultimately its because skyscrapers dont attract customers, they are occupied by employees. Employees will always come to the office, they dont make decision whether to walk-in based on building's aesthetics.

as opposed to customers? When was the last time you went to a mall because of how good it looked?

I have favored certain job offers over others due to liking the building they were in.

Vacuum with big glass doean’t work. They use argon mostly because the noble gases have only 3 degrees of freedom, not 9, thus transferring heat less

Vacuum insulation isn't made from glass plates and is wayyy more expensive, it only makes sense when you need good performance at low thicknesses

I'm certainly no insulation or window expert, but AFAIK argon filled gaps between windows are more common than vacuum. https://vistaza.com/gas-filled-windows-guide/