Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

There are two lines that summarize the article for me:<p>&gt; <i>Why developers chose glass curtain walls - So why did developers embrace the glass box aesthetic? Unsurprisingly, it comes down to economics.</i><p>&gt; <i>Ornamentation and glass curtain wall aren’t mutually exclusive.</i><p>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.<p>Having worked in an all-glass tower and also a &quot;normal&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x2F;or eyes.<p>So, sure, maybe something something costs, but people also pay attention to environmental ergonomics now in ways that they never used to.

&gt; 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.<p>I guess the cost of having to install and run AC is dwarfed by the savings in construction costs?<p>Or is this a case of operational costs being ignored in favor of capital costs?

I always thought large buildings have more windows because the inner spaces would otherwise get 0 natural light.

There&#x27;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&#x27;s <i>From Bauhaus to Our House</i>. For example, Scott Alexander over at ACX also recently put out a review[1]<p>(† It&#x27;s not actually just the blogosphere, this trend extends towards video content like youtube and tiktok as well)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;book-review-from-bauhaus-to...</a>

<i>“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> I&#x27;ve never heard of this man but I have great respect for having some appreciation of external aesthetics.<p><i>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.”</i> It&#x27;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 &quot;15 minute setup&quot; etc.<p><i>For some building features, like granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, or washer&#x2F;dryer hookups, developers can quantify how much they’ll contribute to additional rents.</i> Somehow nearly every new apartment building is &quot;luxury accommodations&quot;, which makes no sense because it should just be bringing up the average of &quot;market accommodations&quot;. I have a feeling buyers&#x2F;renters are catching on to these min&#x2F;maxed characteristics in the same vein as the beautiful kitchens with shoddy rest-of-the-house.

Financial min&#x2F;maxing strikes again.<p>Then again, if something costs more money than it brings in, that thing is probably not long for this world. It&#x27;s nearly impossible to escape economic restraints.

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&#x27;s aesthetics.<p>buildings where you want customers to walk-in and leave money look completely different: macy&#x27;s building in NYC or Galeries Lafayette in Paris or many interesting skyscrapers in Dubai

Glass doesn&#x27;t need to be poorly insulating. Double and triple paned glass are great at insulation. Some even use vacuum, at which point you&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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.

I can understand this as aesthetics are pretty personal so things that get seen by many people end up having to be generic.<p>I do care about the energy consumption though - I think that it might be even more ferocious codes that end up changing things.<p>There&#x27;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.

I like the clean futuristic aesthetic of glass towers.<p>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.

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&#x27;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

floor to ceiling glass windows &quot;sell&quot; better.<p>if you are looking for office space and visiting buildings, looking out from a sheer glass face is <i>sui generis</i>, 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. &quot;I&#x27;ll take it!&quot; is what RE sellers like to hear.

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).

Really, it&#x27;s cost.<p>With steel frames + glass, you have more floor space relative to the structure. And it costs less.

Not in China. Everything will become boring looking with a profit-oriented society.

Don&#x27;t glass boxes also keep more sunlight on the streets because they reflect part of it?

a giant greenhouse

Talking about not wasting money and then planning a building that has more than 6 floors is quite cheeky.

But do you need to wear sunscreen in said glass box?