[HN Gopher] Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
___________________________________________________________________
Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
Author : chmaynard
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-01-13 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| t43562 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elric wrote:
| I'd assume that more insulation and less insolation would
| make that A/C a lot cheaper and less polluting to operate.
| close04 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| > _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...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 facade. 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 wrote:
| 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| My understanding is that double and triple panes are an attempt
| to mitigate this.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| I always thought large buildings have more windows because the
| inner spaces would otherwise get 0 natural light.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| 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.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Apple 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 wrote:
| Only 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
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It seems to be getting rave reviews based on what I've
| seen, and it has steadily rolled out over more of the
| product line and moved down in price (first it was only a
| $1,000 option on their 6K display, now it's a $100 option
| on the iPads and MacBooks). I suspect it will stay.
| gruez wrote:
| >Only reason is an other chunk of money they charge for
| it
|
| Developing and adding the nano-texture isn't exactly
| free. There's also downsides to using the "regular" anti-
| glare technology that most other displays use, so it's
| not exactly a clear case of apple intentionally nerfing a
| product just so they can sell an upgrade for it.
| r00fus wrote:
| The only problems I've ever had with glare are when I use my
| home laptop for FaceTime with family/friends. The lack of
| options from Apple may be a reaction to the market's general
| indifference.
| ricardonunez wrote:
| 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.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| 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.
| yannis wrote:
| >I wonder how modern architects would reimagine more
| traditional closed-in highrises. They normally set the glass
| a bit away from the exterior. For a good example see
| 4-seasons hotel Doha. LED lighting in any modern air-
| conditioned building is a must, also from the POV of
| electrical equipment, transformers cabling etc.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Another catch is heat management in summer_
|
| Possibly, but I have not noticed temperature to be an issue
| in modern buildings anywhere in the United States, so it
| seems at least for this climate band to be a known quantity
| and handily managed.
| badpun wrote:
| The issue is the electricity bill (for cooling).
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Depending on how bad of a problem it is, one can get the
| glass coated to reflect infrared, and that heating issue is
| cut down dramatically.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That will reduce the size of the problem, but infrared
| reflective windows will still accept much more heat than
| some well-insulating concrete.
| rurban wrote:
| Well-insulated concrete doesn't scale to towers. Well-
| insulated metal panels do scale or just coated glass.
| That's what we do as architects.
|
| And ornaments and post-modernist jokers like this guy can
| go with Adolf Loos
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime
| yannis wrote:
| On a high rise office, the glare problem you mentioned is
| normally solved by the Interior Designers, curtains blinds,
| desk design and the like.
| earnestinger wrote:
| > is normally solved by ...
|
| It is normally pretended to be solved. Which is good enough.
| jerlam wrote:
| I had a cubicle setup next to a set of west-facing windows
| with no blinds. My first day working there, in the
| afternoon, I couldn't read my monitors (old office monitors
| that probably peaked at 200 nits) and I promptly took the
| moving boxes and used the cardboard to block off the window
| so I could get some work done.
|
| Someone promptly told me to take down my unsightly
| cardboard, and promised to install window blinds. In a
| month, blinds were installed, but they were the perforated
| blinds which did not cut the glare to an acceptable level.
| More complaints were raised, and then window film was
| installed.
|
| These half-measures didn't work when faced with the direct
| view of the sun, and I would receive no more special
| treatment. I basically abandoned my desk in the afternoons,
| working in an empty desk in the interior of the office. It
| was also more than ten degrees cooler; the temperature at
| my desk would routinely reach 78 degrees.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You also get car and truck exhaust, insects, dust....
| indrora wrote:
| > 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.
| coddingtonbear wrote:
| I'm a little surprised to hear that some folks hate being
| inside such buildings -- my apartment is in one, and I
| specifically selected it for its floor-to-ceiling windows in
| every room. My brain is apparently a little different from
| yours.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Being in Seattle_
|
| Seattle is covered by oppressive gray wetness blotting out
| the sun 80% of the year. Looking at the sky there is just
| depressing, which isn't the case basically anywhere else in
| the US. Like, when we talk about getting natural light, the
| Seattle response is "what's that?" I don't think Seattle
| should really be held as a meaningful baseline here. :)
|
| Maybe in Seattle they can instead replace all the windows
| with video displays of sunshine.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Some of us actually like it this way! The cool grey skies
| can feel calm and even cozy. From my desk on the 22nd
| floor, I get to watch the low cloud layer rolling across
| the hills of the city; every now and then the Cascades peek
| through. If it were all sunny blue out there all the time,
| it'd be too bright to enjoy; I'd probably pull the blinds.
|
| My company's previous office had a view over the rooftop
| garden of the building next door. Even when the sky was
| fully leaden, it was fun to watch the workers poking around
| taking care of the plants.
| darknavi wrote:
| I love the foggy/misty winter days we've had recently. I
| don't mind the lack of bright sunshine during the days,
| but the shortened daylight hours starts to drag pretty
| hard.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Hey! It's 50% of the year, thank you very much (October to
| April).
|
| Summer days here are sunny and super long.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, for sure, between a well designed building and a glass
| tower, the well designed one is always better.
|
| But between an ordinary building with partial windows or
| completely covered in glass, the glass one tends to give you
| a much better experience.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can get something quite similar in some
| colleges/universities, where you can effectively avoid going
| outside for days/weeks at a time.
| LinuxAmbulance wrote:
| Financial 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 wrote:
| 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.
| atq2119 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| 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.
| benbojangles wrote:
| a giant greenhouse
| culi wrote:
| concrete 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 wrote:
| If 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.
| retrac wrote:
| Glass 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 wrote:
| 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
| hoherd wrote:
| 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/
| szundi wrote:
| 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
| pfdietz wrote:
| Also 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/public
| ation/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=90754...
|
| Notice how good CFCs are (even though they have plenty of
| internal degrees of freedom).
| askvictor wrote:
| There are vacuum glass products:
| https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en191212-2
| souenzzo wrote:
| Not in China. Everything will become boring looking with a
| profit-oriented society.
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| I have favored certain job offers over others due to liking the
| building they were in.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| floor 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 wrote:
| _"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 wrote:
| ...what is 8 weeks?
|
| A lot of skilled labor to pay. (I wish they had paid it!)
| njarboe wrote:
| 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.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| There'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...
| mannyv wrote:
| Really, it's cost.
|
| With steel frames + glass, you have more floor space relative to
| the structure. And it costs less.
| Lammy wrote:
| I 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
| fldskfjdslkfj wrote:
| But do you need to wear sunscreen in said glass box?
| k__ wrote:
| Talking about not wasting money and then planning a building that
| has more than 6 floors is quite cheeky.
| damiante wrote:
| Perhaps 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 wrote:
| I 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-13 23:01 UTC)