A “Blind”ing Effect
9 03 2010As you can see, the newly finished glass tetris jewelbox down by the White House is all finished up and tenants have already started moving into the second and third floors. Unfortunately, we noticed that the building takes on a completely different look once a floor is occupied and the full window shades are employed. The contrast is striking since none of the upper floors are occupied yet. What do you think?
[Photo: DCMetrocentric]
I thought that’s what “curtain wall” meant?
The facade is ridiculous. It’s a random collection of projecting “jewel boxes” for random sake. The massing and proportion are odd, befuddling and immature. Did one of the interns at the firm come up with this one over lunch?
I agree that an upsetting visual change when the tenants move in and draw the blinds. Personally, I’m a fan of unobstructed windows all the time (even at home).
However, I fault the architects and engineers for this more than the tenants. DC’s wide streets and low-rise building nature translate into our office buildings enjoying more sunlight than many other cities. However, architects never seem to plan for this with polarized or tinted windows.
Nearly everyone in my office has their blinds drawn all the time so that they can remove the glare from their computer screens. Ironically, this means our office gets even less sunlight than a comparable office in a city like New York.
Unfortunate, but it still beats the Brutalist cinder block that it replaced. (yeah I know, I’m a broken record on Brutalism)
I can’t imagine how the designers ignored the Southwest facing lot either, oh wait, yes I can.
It is amazing how little though was put into this. All the interesting lines which define each floor and contrast the flat glass are lost when the shade is up because the details were put inside the building instead of outside the glass, shame… @Dan - i’m imaging the entire building occupied with the shades up and think we might be better off with brutalist structure!
Another reason for this is people like privacy and dont want to be in a glass box all day for everyone to see.
With buildings like this if there was no walls in the inside you could see through the damn thing, since it is a wall of windows you will have some that are covered by blinds all the time whole others only some times.
The cut-aways are there to maximize the number of “corner” offices that can be utilized and therefore justify the asking rents.
Didn’t Meis solve the problem with the window shades in the 1950s with the Seagrams building? Why can’t these new glass boxes replicate that?
Mies van der rohe “solved” this problem in 1958 on the Seagram Building by having the window blinds adjustable only to certain specified positions, this regularized the facade and created a “decorative” pattern to the blinds to combat this very issue.
Brise Soleil!
@Scott KC. Exactly. The shades only had 3 positions: 1) fully up, 2) fully down, or 3) half open/closed
So you create a problem only to solve it by forcing everyone in the building to have the shades you dictate? Classic (glassic?) modernism! Not exactly working WITH nature.