The original note, as written at the time
Ooh, how to desire a secure bright viewed oven in the name of good modernism.
Ongoing development
Ooh, how to desire a secure bright viewed oven in the name of good modernism.
That is what we are specifying, most of the time, and we know it. A glass facade in this climate, on a west elevation, with no shading and no opening and no idea what it is for — the client asked for glass because glass photographs as modernity, and we detailed it because the fee is in the detailing, and somewhere between the two nobody asked what the room behind it would feel like at four in the afternoon.
The result is an oven. It is bright, which is what we promised. It is viewed, which is what the client wanted. And it is secure, because it is sealed, and the sealing is the thing we mistook for performance. But a room you cannot open is a room you cannot repair, and a room you cannot repair is a room that will fail slowly and expensively behind an unbroken line of glazing.
Blast resistance makes the whole thing harder to argue with, because it is a real requirement that has to be answered. Once you are specifying laminated assemblies and structural silicone and frames that can take a pressure wave, the glass stops being a surface and becomes a piece of machinery, and machinery has to be maintained, inspected, replaced on a cycle, and understood by somebody on the site. That is the part we never design.
So the position is not that glass is wrong. It is that a high-security, fully glazed, hermetically sealed building in a tropical city is three requirements pulling in three directions, and the drawing where they meet is almost never shown to the client. What they are told is that it will be beautiful and safe. What they are not told is that it will be hot, that the cooling will run forever, that a cracked pane is a procurement exercise, and that the room will have no relationship with the weather outside except as an adversary.
I would rather see us specify glass where it earns its place — a shaded screen, a protected court, a specific room that wants light and can afford the heat — and be honest about the rest. The modernist ambition is not threatened by a wall that is not glass. It is threatened by a wall that pretends to be glass and behaves like a sealed box.
The right question at the design review is not whether the elevation looks modern. It is whether a person in that room can open something, and whether the building can be repaired by the people who will actually own it.