The Toronto Glass Architect Argument

When you're dealing with floor-to-ceiling glass, you're just dealing with one trade." Along Burlingtons's waterfront is the Discovery Landing Centre and Cafe, Rotary Centre Pond, and Spencers at the Waterfront.

Seeing the (wet) future in glass buildings: Toronto, Mississauga and the greater Toronto area (GTA) need their glass consciousness raised. Building experts say resiliency and energy efficiency are going out the window with all those floor-to-ceiling glass walls being installed in the city's towering condos. "There's only one reason why all these buildings have floor-to-ceiling windows: it's because architects and builders are lazy, " maintains retired architect and developer Lloyd Alter, who writes for Treehugger and teaches sustainable design at Ryerson University.

"If you have a building that's brick and glass, you've got to hire a mason, you've got to hire a window guy and you've got to co-ordinate them. When you're dealing with floor-to-ceiling glass, you're just dealing with one trade." Ted Kesik, a professor of building science at the University of Toronto and an outspoken critic of the condo development industry, says he, too, worries that condo developers care more about profits than ensuring their buildings last. "I feel sorry for people in buildings like that, because those windows are going to fall out in an extreme weather event. There will be water damage. It's just going to be a mess."
 

Even Toronto's new chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, allows there's a problem with the windows' efficiency. "I share those concerns, " she says. "We need to be talking about this more as a city: how do we ensure that we do build buildings that have resiliency over the long term?" It's understandable, almost desirable, that developers want to move as quickly as possible. Keeping city roads blocked requires permits and frustrates the public. Logistics are a headache, especially for some of the newer guys on the building block who lack experience. And "window walls," the system most developers are using, are not as pricey, durable or difficult to put up as "curtain walls, " which is how Toronto's commercial towers were built. Time is money. But how fast is too fast?
 

For Alter, the main problem is energy efficiency. The glass has almost no insulation capacity. "When you look at the size of the little window that opens - because the building code says you have to have a little window in there — it's a little slot that's the size of an ice-cream stand pass-through, " he bristles. "There's no cross-ventilation. So they're constantly fighting to generate air conditioning, to generate heat, all because they've built these incredible dense buildings and they've given them these terrible, terrible skins."
 

But Arash Beheshti, vice-president of construction for Concord Adex, which is behind CityPlace, says it has to be a marketable product. "People want glass because they want to look outside, " he says, adding there are "misconceptions" about floor-to-ceiling windows. "Brick doesn't necessarily have a higher insulating value than glass," he says, pointing out that usually only one side of a condo is exposed to the outside while the floor, ceiling and sides are not. "When you look at the heat loss per unit of a condominium, you're looking at way less than at a house."
 

For Kesik, it's also an insurance issue. "Premiums are already rising because of climate change," says Kesik, who predicts that condo owners will see increases of 500 per cent over the years. Beheshti rejects charges that glass walls are more vulnerable to weather: "The exterior building envelope is actually more watertight, weather-tight, when you actually don't have multiple segments of different products. If it's all glass, it's actually more sustainable to the exterior weather than if you have brick-block-glass-concrete-wood."
 

When it comes to claims that glass towers use less energy, Alter is totally dismissive. "When you take the entire population of that glass building, and divide it by the entire consumption of that building, they will say this is green; we're using less energy per capita, " he says. "It's a fallacy. "If you look at the building as a whole rather than per capita, it's using a huge amount of energy that wouldn't have to be used heating and cooling because of all that glass." Kesik, an authority on retrofitting older buildings, also says you can't just tear them down and start over because, as experts agree, the concrete structures underneath these blue-green glass exteriors are built to last. 

"I have always maintained that, when you're looking at those glass towers there, you're basically looking at the slums of the future, " insists Kesik. "No one will want to buy them because people will look at them and say, ‘Are you crazy? I don't want to buy something that leaks, that will cost a fortune to retrofit.' So when they can't get sold, they'll get rented. And they're not of a high quality, so they can't get rented for a lot of money. So who do you think is going to live there? I tell people, this is where your grandchildren are going to come to buy crack. "No one wants to talk about these things because it gets people scared, " he warns. "The guys in the condos don't want to talk about it because they're sitting there saying, ‘You can't talk like that, you're going to devalue my condo and, if you devalue my condo, I am going to sue you for having devalued my real estate investment.' "This is how bad it has gotten. It's that cruel a joke."

2400 dead birds, victims of window collisions in Toronto in 2012 on display at the ROM. Click to enlarge.

Birds killed flying into buildings on display at Toronto museum: Visitors stepped into the Royal Ontario Museum this week for a look at a piece of urban history — a layout of dead birds that had collided with Toronto buildings. The Fatal Light Awareness Program, or appropriately, FLAP, hosts the yearly exhibition using collected corpses of birds that were victims of window collisions. Sounds like messy work.

Next to artifacts from ancient Cyprus and historical architecture from China, dead birds seem like a bizarre choice for a museum. But there's a point to make here. It's that Toronto, not only its people but its very existence, is deadly to birds. About a million birds are killed every year after colliding with buildings in Toronto, according to research by FLAP. Since birds have no concept of glass, reflective windows trick them into thinking there's clear sky before them, when in fact there's an office tower. Birds also become disoriented because of bright lights shining through cities at night, according to the organization. The troubles of a migrating bird don't stop there. You try flying south across an entire continent while dodging wind turbines, condo buildings and Lachute, Quebec.

More blogs on bird-strikes here.