Window
walls and privacy
“I have as much privacy as a goldfish
in a bowl.”
—Princess Margaret
Newer condominiums with window walls look great and are a selling
feature. However, buyers thinking that they will enjoy great views from
inside their units may find that they have become someone else's view.
If your condo faces other condos, or office towers, your curtains may
need to be closed almost all the time.
New
York apartment dwellers furious over artist’s photos taken through
windows
National Post
Jake Pearson, Associated Press
17 May 2013
One
of the photographs for sale at a New York City gallery.
NEW YORK — In one photo, a woman is on all fours, presumably picking
something up, her posterior pressed against a glass window. Another
photo shows a couple in bathrobes, their feet touching beneath a table.
And there is one of a man, in jeans and a T-shirt, lying on his side as
he takes a nap.
In all the photos, taken by New York City artist Arne Svenson from his
second-floor apartment, the faces are obscured or not shown. The people
are unidentifiable.
But the residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across
the street had no idea they were being photographed and never consented
to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display—and for
sale—in a Manhattan gallery.
“I don’t feel it’s a violation in a legal sense, but in a New York,
personal sense there was a line crossed,” said Michelle Sylvester, who
lives in the residential building called the Zinc Building, which
stands out with its floor-to-ceiling windows in a neighbourhood of
cobblestone streets and old, brick warehouse buildings.
Svenson’s apartment is directly across the street, just to the south,
giving him a clear view of his neighbours by simply looking out his
window.
“I think there’s an understanding that when you live here with glass
windows, there will be straying eyes but it feels different with
someone who has a camera,” Sylvester said.
Svenson’s show, “The Neighbors,” opened last Saturday at the Julie Saul
Gallery in Chelsea, where about a dozen large prints are on sale for up
to $7,500. His exhibit is drawing a lot of attention, not for the
quality of the work, but for the manner in which it was made.
Svenson did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated
Press, but says in material accompanying the exhibit that the idea for
it came when he inherited a telephoto lens from a friend, a birdwatcher
who recently died.
“For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing
behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the
curtain raised high,” Svenson says in the gallery notes. “The Neighbors
don’t know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the
shadows of my home into theirs.”
Linda Darcia, an exchange student from Colombia living with a family on
the sixth floor facing Svenson’s studio, said she had no idea whether
or not she was depicted in any of the pieces but she was anxious to go
to the gallery and find out.
“I’m not really upset about it because that’s his job,” she said. “But
maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody’s
talking about it.”
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Toronto’s glass-wall condos
CondoMadness
July 2016
A woman recently bought a one-bedroom condo in a new window-wall building on
Charles Street East. She looks out, through her ceiling-to-floor windows and
faces a similar building next door.
There are a very large number of young renters in these buildings.
The amazing thing is that very few of the units that she can look
straight into have any curtains. She sees people walking round in their
underwear or naked as they go to the washroom and then back to bed.
Does she have curtains that are closed at night and whenever she needs privacy. Yes, yes, yes.
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Condos are the glass menageries of Toronto
Toronto Star (abridged)
Heather Mallick
02 November 2016
“Hey, they got new couches,” I say as we drive along the Gardiner
looking into condo living rooms only a few metres away. “I think
they’re going to regret those trumpet lamps though. Is that a guy
thing?”
I do this because I can. But why would you allow me to?
Inside Toronto’s glass towers nuzzled up against each other, owners
have no privacy. They’re Edward Hopper’s nighthawks. This might be
because they’re exhibitionists — the same way earnest young architects
love Brutalist cement barns because they’re a blank backdrop for one’s
own gloriousness — or because they didn’t think things through.
Meanwhile, strangers stuck in traffic mock your throw pillows.
Glass was precious once. In 1696, England imposed a window tax —
windows were easy for tax collectors to count — and glass became a
status symbol for the rich. But glass is cheap now and developers use
it lavishly, pushing it as fashionable.
Beware fashion. The condos of the truly rich look sturdier, have
smaller windows and a lot of architectural detailing. They don’t want
your glass menagerie.
When owners of $8.6-million glass condos in London realized that
visitors to Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery could stare straight into
their homes, they protested at having become a human art installation.
The Tate’s director sneered and told them to buy “net curtains.” This
was a class-based insult, a real whack at the knees. Only peasants like
privacy apparently.
Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times’ architectural critic, recently
wrote a fine essay on “glass, class and transparent lives,” and I was
happy because glass is now so omnipresent that no one discusses its
malign effects.
Glass condos were sold as regal—you can look out over your spread—until you realized everyone could see in.
Homes need walls. That’s what makes them homes. A window is not a wall;
it is also not sturdy. Badly installed, it falls and shatters in the
streets. Partly thanks to warping — on the increase from extreme
temperatures — those condo “walls” will have to be replaced every few
decades. With a bit of neglect, a whole area becomes a slum.
As Heathcote writes, glass architecture began in Britain with buildings
like the Palm House at Kew in 1848 and the Crystal Palace in London in
1851. Those were sturdy walls of smaller framed windows, but look at
the landmark glass cube Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, he
writes. It’s a symbol (the actual shop is underground) of how
sinisterly transparent our lives are turning out to be.
Heathcote writes gently that the suburban curtain-twitching mocked by
the Tate is actually being neighbourly in Jane Jacobs style. You know
your neighbourhood and who’s in it, and this is what led the backlash
against Airbnb. The bricked Tate overlooks your glass home, but you
can’t see into the Tate. Who’s the ogre now?
“There was always an ethical dimension to transparency, the opening up
of everyday life to the world, the throwing open of the metaphorical
curtains,” writes Heathcote. This is why Berlin’s new Reichstag has
“glazed chambers,” for a confident citizenry, no Nazis governing here.
But we didn’t give explicit permission to have our personal lives exposed. It just sort of happened.
glass walls enable surveillance by weird neighbours
Glass walls enable surveillance by weird neighbours, which is something
women should consider. I have stalkers, so there are three layers of
blinds on some windows of my house. I like light but I block anyone
peering in.
At some point, condo owners will grow sick of transparency and buy blinds, which rather negates the purpose of the glass room.
Then you wouldn’t have strangers deploring the weird brother-in-law
sleeping on your couch, or what the dog does when you’re out.
Or the way you have sex. Trust me, you’re not doing it right. She is
done with you. I can see the look in her eye. She’s getting up to leave.
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