4 ms·

It'd be interesting to see a composite of reflected sunlight included around the builings with highly reflective exteriors.

• Bartweiss 9y ago
  This strikes me as a definite perk of the glass-and-steel skyscraper design. Older brick and stone designs seem to waste a lot more light, especially as they get dirty and lose albedo.
  • twobyfour 9y ago
    Brick and stone buildings have mostly been kept clean the last 15 years or so, and they don't darken as quickly as they did in the 20th C when both transportation and industry produced far more soot. That said, I've seen buildings that were nearly black with 100 years of accumulated soot at the end of the 1980s undergo deep cleaning (sandblasting) in the 90's and come out off-white. It's pretty remarkable. 25 years later, those same buildings are now almost exactly the same color they were immediately after the cleaning, without any further maintenance.
    • Bartweiss 9y ago
      It is a pretty stunning difference. Honestly, I think I'm mostly thinking of a handful of black stone buildings (famously, American Radiator) and buildings which haven't been cleaned since the '70s or '80s.