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> 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.

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.

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)

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....

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.

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

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.