Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes | Hacker News Reader

Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

construction-physics.com

126 pointschmaynard89 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

To be fair, it's actually different from the more traditional take on anti-glare (usually a separate film) in that Apple physically alters the glass surface directly instead, which affects the colors less, so it's not just a pointless marketing distinction.

Whether the benefit justifies the price tag is another matter...

Isn't altering the texture essentially just 'matte' like most LCD displays used to be, just through something like etched glass like steamdeck had as an option?

It is exactly what it is, and describing it as "anti-glare" or "matte" is reasonable and accurate. I'm just saying that I see why Apple uses a distinctive term instead to highlight the difference in their approach and its purported advantages.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

It's funny how we're going back to centuries-old architectural practices. In the before times we didn't have climate control. In the middle times we had climate control and didn't have to worry about the energy usage. And now we have to return to natural ways of controlling temperatures so we don't spend too much energy on heating and cooling.

But my curiosity is directed at even more extreme examples. How bright and livable could one make a big box with almost no windows these days, if one really tried? (As I'm typing this out the counter-question is of course: why bother?)

> 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.

The issue is the electricity bill (for cooling).

It is handled with climate control, at great energy cost. It's all fine for the person in the office, less so where fossil fuel is burned to generate electricity.

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.

That will reduce the size of the problem, but infrared reflective windows will still accept much more heat than some well-insulating concrete.

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

Sure but well-insulated concrete doesn’t transmit much visible light.

On a high rise office, the glare problem you mentioned is normally solved by the Interior Designers, curtains blinds, desk design and the like.

> is normally solved by …

It is normally pretended to be solved. Which is good enough.

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.

I feel your pain (but in Celsius)

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.

    > especially as a former Boston resident, where the local city offices are an architectural crime against humanity

If anyone does not understand this reference, the city hall is brutalist style from the 1960s. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall

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.

You also get car and truck exhaust, insects, dust....

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Hey! It's 50% of the year, thank you very much (October to April).

Summer days here are sunny and super long.

Hush. It's better when most of the world thinks it's overcast and rains here year round. We have too many people as it is.

We just need to upzone everything to allow buildings and problem solved.

> which isn't the case basically anywhere else in the US

Hi from Buffalo, NY! We get clouds and apocalyptic snow!

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.

    > well designed and poorly designed glass towers

Can you share some specifics that made some well-designed and others poorly-designed? To me, when I work inside a glass tower, they all seem the same to me -- great views and great natural light. Another thing that really matters: The floor height. I once worked in a glass tower that had double height floors. The natural light was unbeatable.

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.

You can get something quite similar in some colleges/universities, where you can effectively avoid going outside for days/weeks at a time.

> 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?

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.

I'd assume that more insulation and less insolation would make that A/C a lot cheaper and less polluting to operate.

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.

> 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...

> 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).

>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.

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 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.

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.

My understanding is that double and triple panes are an attempt to mitigate this.

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

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.

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...

“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.

  ...what is 8 weeks?

A lot of skilled labor to pay. (I wish they had paid it!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

>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?

I have favored certain job offers over others due to liking the building they were in.

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.

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

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/

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

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/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=90754...

Notice how good CFCs are (even though they have plenty of internal degrees of freedom).

There are vacuum glass products: https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/en191212-2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I 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.

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.

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's cost.

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't glass boxes also keep more sunlight on the streets because they reflect part of it?

a giant greenhouse

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

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.

i wonder what corbusier would say

> 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.

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?

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