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Comment by Arn_Thor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

>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?)

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.

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