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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
- t43562 2y agoI can understand this as aesthetics are pretty personal so things that get seen by many people end up having to be generic. I do care about the energy consumption though - I think that it might be even more ferocious codes that end up changing things. There's also the potential impact of working from home. I imagine that huge skyscrapers housing offices for the main part are more affected than e.g. industrial buildings.
- lesuorac 2y ago> Air conditioning was becoming common, making it possible to cool buildings with large expanses of windows that might otherwise get too hot in the summer. I guess the cost of having to install and run AC is dwarfed by the savings in construction costs? Or is this a case of operational costs being ignored in favor of capital costs?
- hemloc_io 2y agoI'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.
- elric 2y agoI'd assume that more insulation and less insolation would make that A/C a lot cheaper and less polluting to operate.
- close04 2y agoA large floor area in a tall building means windows can only exist on the perimeter and almost definitely can't open for ventilation. Also the larger the floor, the more natural light the windows have to allow in and the more heat from the Sun they'll trap. In that space there will be lots of computers, screens, and lots of other electrical systems (even just for the lighting) generating a lot of heat. So HVAC is anyway needed for the building to operate properly and the people to be comfortable even before you factor in the outside climate.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> 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/S0360132319307152 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
- throw0101a 2y ago> 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).
- hammock 2y ago>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.
- yannis 2y agoFor 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.
- gruez 2y agoThe 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.
- daedrdev 2y agoMy understanding is that double and triple panes are an attempt to mitigate this.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoI always thought large buildings have more windows because the inner spaces would otherwise get 0 natural light.
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- bluGill 2y agoGood 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoThere are two lines that summarize the article for me: > Why developers chose glass curtain walls - So why did developers embrace the glass box aesthetic? Unsurprisingly, it comes down to economics. > Ornamentation and glass curtain wall aren’t mutually exclusive. And while I agree that ornamentation is very likely lost to cost savings, the switch to glass walls is also just a huge improvement for people inside the building. 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. So, sure, maybe something something costs, but people also pay attention to environmental ergonomics now in ways that they never used to.
- jchw 2y agoThis 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.
- LordDragonfang 2y agoApple historically have not offered anti-glare, but the most recent macbook pros now offer a "nano-texture" display, which is their marketing term for anti-glare.
- szundi 2y agoOnly reason is an other chunk of money they charge for it. But I am sure that they measured it’ll make profits. We’ll see next year wether it stays or not
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- LinuxAmbulance 2y agoFinancial min/maxing strikes again. Then again, if something costs more money than it brings in, that thing is probably not long for this world. It's nearly impossible to escape economic restraints.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoInterestingly 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.
- atq2119 2y agoThe irony is of course that unionization of tech workers is bound to come, and I'd say it's a safe bet that it's going to come first in workplaces that are heavily RTO.
- bluGill 2y agoVery 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.
- benbojangles 2y agoa giant greenhouse
- culi 2y agoconcrete and glass. It's truly an awful way to build in so many parts of the world but as building regulation gets exported so does this style of building. Displacing more localized and efficiently cooled/warmed building styles
- fsckboy 2y agoIf you are going to have a big box, there is no way to avoid all the solar energy, but when you are cooling on the scale of a skyscraper, your cooling towers are cooling more efficiently than a house air conditioner. heat pump in suite pumps heat into flowing water pipe, water pipe goes up to the roof, heat transferred through heat exchanger to different water, cooling towers spray a fountain of that water into the air, blow fans across it for evaporative cooling; then that cooler water is collected, sent to transfer more heat back in the same heat exchanger, and the now cooler water is sent down to the suite to come around again. Same system us used in the winter for heating, not with the cooling tower, but with very high temp steam from power plants sent underground to all the buildings NYC has a smaller carbon footprint per capita than most other places with economic activity.
- benbojangles 2y agoi wonder what corbusier would say
- aidenn0 2y ago> NYC has a smaller carbon footprint per capita than most other places with economic activity. Truly a city known for it's balmy southern climate.
- retrac 2y agoGlass doesn't need to be poorly insulating. Double and triple paned glass are great at insulation. Some even use vacuum, at which point you're basically building a giant Thermos. Getting a good seal is still tricky. Unwanted solar heat or unwanted heat escape via infrared can be modulated with windows that have adjustable reflectivity in the infrared. Unfortunately, it's expensive to build that way! But there have been a few attempts at this approach in the last decade, mostly in places like Norway or Quebec.
- cenamus 2y agoVacuum insulation isn't made from glass plates and is wayyy more expensive, it only makes sense when you need good performance at low thicknesses
- hoherd 2y agoI'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/ https://vistaza.com/gas-filled-windows-guide/
- szundi 2y agoVacuum 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
- pfdietz 2y agoAlso the higher molecular weight helps. Krypton is better than argon; xenon would be better still but is very expensive. Thermal conductivity of gases: https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=907540 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=90754... Notice how good CFCs are (even though they have plenty of internal degrees of freedom).
- askvictor 2y agoThere are vacuum glass products: https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en191212-2 https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en191212-2
- souenzzo 2y agoNot in China. Everything will become boring looking with a profit-oriented society.
- slt2021 2y agoultimately 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. buildings where you want customers to walk-in and leave money look completely different: macy's building in NYC or Galeries Lafayette in Paris or many interesting skyscrapers in Dubai
- gruez 2y ago>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?
- Lammy 2y agoI have favored certain job offers over others due to liking the building they were in.
- ryanmarsh 2y agoI worked in the Pennzoil building (mentioned). It was a horrible waste of space, for what? A couple of nondescript black triangles? They could have had so much more leasable space and the floors wouldn't have been these odd shaped low ceiling caverns to make up for the loss of useable space. Just think, each of those triangular towers needs its own core with plumbing and elevator shafts. Good grief.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI had never seen this building. The dark glass is an odd choice for an oil company, all it makes me think of is how they are polluting the world with smoke and soot. It looks like a building Sauron would have enjoyed.
- fsckboy 2y agofloor to ceiling glass windows "sell" better. if you are looking for office space and visiting buildings, looking out from a sheer glass face is sui generis, and your sense of altitude in the pit of your stomach is enhanced by glass all the way to the floor; anything that interrupts that angle of view lets the air out of that balloon. "I'll take it!" is what RE sellers like to hear.
- TheJoeMan 2y ago“Mr. Liedtke, this is going to cost X hundreds of thousands of dollars’ or something. Hugh didn’t answer. He looked at us, Philip and me, and he said, ‘Put ‘em back,’ and we put ‘em back on. And he said, ‘That’s it’ and left. I've never heard of this man but I have great respect for having some appreciation of external aesthetics. It was erected in “six-and-a-half working days, a remarkable feat compared with the eight weeks or more that a conventional masonry facade would have required.” It's surprising how much we have to deal with for the benefit of saving relatively little time in initial installation. These buildings are supposed to last decades, what is 8 weeks? This same principal is evident with consumer products that have ugly fragile snap-together seams so they can trumpet "15 minute setup" etc. For some building features, like granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, or washer/dryer hookups, developers can quantify how much they’ll contribute to additional rents. Somehow nearly every new apartment building is "luxury accommodations", which makes no sense because it should just be bringing up the average of "market accommodations". I have a feeling buyers/renters are catching on to these min/maxed characteristics in the same vein as the beautiful kitchens with shoddy rest-of-the-house.
- pchristensen 2y ago...what is 8 weeks? A lot of skilled labor to pay. (I wish they had paid it!)
- njarboe 2y agoBuildings 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.
- LordDragonfang 2y agoThere's an interesting trend in the modern blogosphere† (especially substack with its more technical audience) where an interesting non-fiction book will come out, and we get a wave of blog posts essentially summarizing the key points book. The better bloggers will also add their own takes and previous encounters with the subject. In this case it's From Bauhaus to Our House. For example, Scott Alexander over at ACX also recently put out a review[1] († It's not actually just the blogosphere, this trend extends towards video content like youtube and tiktok as well) [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to...
- mannyv 2y agoReally, it's cost. With steel frames + glass, you have more floor space relative to the structure. And it costs less.
- Lammy 2y agoI like the aesthetics of glass towers just fine on their own but dislike their effect on the surrounding environment due to all the reflections. Not even in a melt-your-car way like the curved one in London. I just think it's ugly to have a beautiful old stone or steel or whatever-else-cladded building partially lit up with a wobbly grid of slowly-moving bright spots especially in the late afternoon hours when the sun is low in the sky. It started bothering me when it ruined every photo of certain buildings I traveled to see, like 33 Thomas Street, and now it annoys me on a daily basis even in my home city lol
- t43562 2y agoI did walk past a fairly small glass building.....in London....every day on the way to work and it was wonderful in the winter. It was significantly warmer for about 15 metres and also brighter. I wished there could have been a place to drink coffee there and enjoy it for a few minutes.
- fldskfjdslkfj 2y agoBut do you need to wear sunscreen in said glass box?
- k__ 2y agoTalking about not wasting money and then planning a building that has more than 6 floors is quite cheeky.
- damiante 2y agoPerhaps just coincidence but I found it interesting to realise that buildings and animals followed a similar structural development trend: both started off with externally structural components (exoskeletons and structural walls) that evolved to become internal structural components (endoskeletons and load-bearing columns with concrete flooring).
- seryoiupfurds 2y agoI like the clean futuristic aesthetic of glass towers. I think a lot of the opposition comes from people who dislike that it represents a building that is obviously new and well maintained, and associate that with their general distaste for wealth.
- nurumaik 2y agoDon't glass boxes also keep more sunlight on the streets because they reflect part of it?