The Curse of the Modern Office

One thing I take offense to is this statement:

> Opening multiple windows on a computer screen doesn't work for back-and-forth cross-referencing of other material during authoring work, both because of slow visual navigation and because of the limited space on the computer screen.

That's a problem that's easily solved with a half decent window manager.

Nuclear is ~20% of our electricity gen, so 1/4th of that is 1/20th or 5% of US electricity aka not really that big a deal. Energy wise getting to an office is generally far more expensive.

Further they talk about BTU for heating ignoring heat pumps generally being over 100% efficient and running on electricity.

I ran this through the read-o-meter => http://niram.org/read/ and it says "Estimated reading time: 20 minutes, 38 seconds. Contains 4128 words".

How many of you here actually read the entire article? Just curious, not trolling.

The fact that US offices are designed to maximize return on real estate investment, not knowledge worker productivity, is well known.

I wish our screens were better so there's not the continual battle between daylight and readability. E-ink for coding?

Money handlers, that's what these enormous buildings were for. And at this point in time with our use of a fiat currency, money is just a digital construct. So what is the need for having a physical space to house all of these people booting up their computers and networking and playing around with these numbers in a virtual environment? Perhaps at one time when computers were not a thing it would be necessary to collect those types into a consolidated area for the purpose of communication and organization, but we are no longer at the mercy of physical proximity being necessary for that. We continue to utilize these structures and maintain this method of worker placement and organization past their relevance, for seemingly no other reason than perpetuating an archetype of the "business building". Why else would there be a need to have these monuments to the conquerors of finance?

Goldman Sachs maintains them as monuments so that we continue to look upon them as monuments, and the institutions they represent as being deserving of such reverence. They never turn off the lights because they can, not because they need to.

People on $200,000 left a 5 cent light on pp? Meh.

You could work on using that $200,000 more efficiently if you want to save money.

I think you are falling for the stupid marketing. Wow we pulled 100 cars worth off the road by turning lights off at night! (as a one million car per year organization)

Probably depends on who pays the power bill. Maybe some commercial leases include power ? Also, in NYC a lot of people work insane hours, so even one person staying till 9 or 10pm pretty much requires all the lights to be on. The housekeeping staff usually start about 7-8pm and assuming an 8 hour shift, thats 2-3am at least that they'll be there.

Overall I bet lights are a very small fraction of a building's electrical bill. Think of an elevator and how many amps it requires to power a motor the size of small car lifting 900+lbs of people 30+ stories all day. One guy going to the top floor probably uses enough power to light the building for half a day.

Furthermore these scaling laws don't necessarily hold when there is a paradigm difference. E.g. you don't worry about scaling laws when comparing a building that can be lighted mostly (or entirely) from natural sources to one that can't; in fact the smaller scale is more efficient from this perspective.

"Many office buildings had window accomodating H-, T-, and L-shaped footprints to encourage natural lighting, ventilation, and cooling"

All that is mechanical in big square blobs.

Also, at the scale of large office buildings, and given that those more slender buildings would have an optimal orientation, I am not sure building shape matters that much in heating costs.

The article also states "While heating was the main energy use in pre-1950s office buildings, today cooling, lighting and electronic equipment (all operated by electricity), use 70% of all energy on-site.", but that's not a strong argument, as slender buildings would have the electronic equipment, too.

"The US Modernist office building, a cube with a steel skeleton and glass curtain walls, is essentially a massive greenhouse that would be unbearable for most of the year without artificial cooling. Because glazed façades don't insulate well, energy use for heating is also high."

And to add insult to injury, there's lighting. Yay for the cube farm!!!

"In spite of all the glass, most US office buildings require artificial lighting throughout the day because many office workers are too far from a window to receive enough natural light."