Architecture+Design Scotland

Show navigation

People in Glass Houses

One of the pleasures of my job is that I get to spend a lot of time in and around the best new buildings in the country as I seek out the key views that will record my clients' achievements, and make their work accessible to a wider audience. As those who have employed me will know, it invariably takes me several visits to photograph a single building, over a period of days, weeks or months.

Consequently, I come to view and appreciate a building from several different perspectives, empty and occupied, at different times of the day and year, and in varying light conditions. There is an initial intensity to this examination; I am, after all, seeking out the best vantage points, trying to show off the building's most significant features and downplay anything that detracts from the design. However, once I have identified my spot, I typically leave the camera set up for anything between one and four hours so there is ample time for being more passive and contemplative while I wait, observe, listen and interact.

This combination of conscious and unconscious reactions to buildings, repeated hundreds of times, has allowed me to form tentative opinions about the relative success of certain design features, materials and spatial arrangements. These opinions do not add up to a conventional architectural critique - I have no architectural background and only a rudimentary knowledge of the history of architecture - but rather a pragmatic understanding of what tends to work well and not so well.

In this series of blogs, I am going to focus on one design decision at a time, share my observations, invite comments, and hopefully facilitate some sort of debate where visitors to the website can share their views.

I would like to start by opening up a discussion on the use of glass in architecture, the timing of which is appropriate given that this year marks the centenary of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer designing the first completely glass facade: the Fagus Factory in Germany. To quote Gropius:

'Glass is the purest form of building material made from earthly matter. It can mark the limits to spaces, it can protect us against the weather, but at the same time opens up spaces, it is light and incorporeal. Although glass as such has been known to us for many years, it is the technical age we now live in with all its modern manufacturing processes that has rendered this substance one of the most valuable materials of our day and of the future. Glass architecture, until recently deemed purely utopian, is now a reality.'

In the intervening 100 years, glass has accrued additional virtues such as transparency (in the institutional as well as visual sense), weightlessness, seamlessness, thermal gain, and the softening of distinctions between interiors and exteriors. At times, there seems to be a perception that the modernity and ambition of the design is expressed in proportion to the amount of glass used.

So what has photographing architecture taught me about glass? Well, from a purely photographic point of view, it presents challenges: it shows dirt more than any other material; throughout the day and from day to day it will vary anywhere from 100% transparent to 100% reflective; and, when it is transparent, whatever is behind it becomes dominant. It is the last of these challenges that raises the question about whether the perceived positive characteristics of glass can sometimes be negated by quite mundane practical considerations.

Let's start with blinds. Invariably, in the daytime at least, I photograph buildings in direct sunlight so that shadows will separate planes and reveal depth. Part of that depth comes from windows, which on a sunny day should read as dark reflections of the predominantly blue sky. Blinds, however, interrupt that sense of depth and create ambiguity; are we looking at a window or a solid panel? So, an unglamorous part of my job is to open all the blinds and to close all the windows to restore the intended flat, reflective seamlessness.

Occasionally what I find, especially in offices, is that the blinds are always closed, and not just on sunny days. I find myself having to beg office workers to open their blinds for just five minutes - enough time for me to run out and take the photo. What they tell me is that their offices with floor-to-ceiling windows overheat and that they can't see their monitors because of glare. The windows that were meant to improve the users' working environment, end up creating an uncomfortable one.

As those inside make their conditions bearable, the appearance of the elevation is compromised; instead of those on the outside seeing an impressive single sheet of glass, the experience is of the back of a cheap roller blind. The concept of the elevation may have been the contrast between brick and glass, but instead it becomes between brick and thin fabric. The intention may have been to celebrate the repetition of uniform panes of glass, but that repetition is interrupted by a series of blinds that are open, closed, half-closed and askew. Do these observations point to situations where glass can sometimes create a tension (rather than a connection) between users inside and outside the building?

Another situation where blinds and curtains always seem to be closed is in low-rise semi-detached and terraced housing. Again, it is a struggle - that involves knocking on lots of doors - for me to get the windows to look like glass even for a short time. In this situation, glare and overheating are not so much the problem, but privacy is. It begs the question: if almost every house in a street has net curtains, diffuser blinds or venetian blinds, do the residents really want large windows facing the street at all? I have seen a similar phenomenon with glass-fronted spaces designed for academics and artists. While the idea might have been to foster a sense of community and the cross-pollination of ideas, the reality is that many of these users are intensely private in the way they work. The first thing they do is to cover the glass with posters or simply plain paper. The experience from the outside? The backs of artworks, masking tape and Bluetack.

In the situations described above, the problem was loss of transparency. However, transparency itself can pose a major problem: in seeing other people's mess! I can imagine that the experience of looking into the Fagus Factory in the early twentieth century had a predictable and desired effect: uniformly-dressed workers would be seen industriously going about their tasks at immaculately tidy desks. However, the experience of looking into many modern offices is that of seeing desks piled high with files, stacks of archive boxes on the floor, waste paper bins with their obligatory white liners, coat stands, monitors covered in Gonks, post-it notes, and floor fans (to combat the overheating).

Over the years, I have moved tons of these stray items trying to make offices bear some resemblance to purposeful, well-organised workplaces. The question that arises is whether the idea of institutional transparency (part of the motivation for allowing clear views into these offices) is always appropriate. Does it not depend on there being an awareness from the user that they are on display, that their desks are visible and thus part of the fabric of the building? If that culture does not exist, then is it right to impose those unsightly views on other users of the building?

Are there times when the transparency and seamlessness that glass promises are not fulfilled? And, does glass sometimes offer unwelcome transparency?

Andrew Lee has been photographing new buildings in Scotland since 1996. In his exclusive new Blog for www.scottisharchitecture.com, Andrew will be exploring the links between architecture and photography, and asking what lessons can be learned from the way buildings translate into photographs.

Images: Andrew Lee