The original note, as written at the time
One of these days, I should just have a really good architectural concept where glass is celebrated in the right way in a tropical environment. Very well shaded and continuous, clean, no millions, no nothing, but well-shaded with planting and with this place, a space itself that is made of glass items. Glass culture, glass walls, glass hinges, now that is the proper way to use glass, but it’s reserved for specific spaces, not everywhere.
Ongoing development
One of these days I should have a really good architectural concept where glass is celebrated in the right way in a tropical environment.
Very well shaded, and continuous, and clean. No millions, no nothing — meaning no cascading atriums and no bravura curtain wall that costs a fortune to run. Just glass in a place where glass is genuinely the right material, shaded properly with planting, and a space that is itself made of glass things: glass culture, glass walls, glass hinges, glass in the details as well as in the enclosure.
The distinction I am after is between glass as enclosure and glass as material. Most of our buildings use glass as the cheapest way to close a hole in the wall while looking modern, and the result is a surface that has to work hard to justify itself and usually fails. What I want is a building where glass is chosen for what it does — light, reflection, transparency, the particular quality of a space that can be seen through — and then detailed to the level that suits a material being used deliberately.
Reserved for specific spaces, not everywhere. That is the rule. The glass room should be somewhere you go, not the envelope you are forced to sit inside all day. If one space in a building is glazed generously and the rest of the building is properly walled, then the glazed space becomes an event and can afford to be special. When every surface is glass, there is nowhere special to go, and the material stops meaning anything.
And shading is not a concession, it is the design. In this climate a glazed space only works if it is protected, and the protection — deep overhangs, planting, screens, a whole architecture of interruption — is what makes the glass possible. Plant is part of that. A shaded glass wall with something growing against it is cooler, better looking and more forgiving than the same wall with nothing, and the green gives the reflections something worth reflecting.
So the ambition is not a glass tower. It is one beautifully resolved glass room in a proper building, in a tropical city, where the material is celebrated for the reasons it deserves and detailed like somebody cared about the joints. That building would teach more than a street of curtain wall.