Building Enclosure Consulting

  Are you planning to dispose of architectural glass samples? The ridiculously heavy, 1 foot by 1 foot squares from the long-forgotten projects, which still take up the precious space in your office? Rather than sending them to a landfill, give them to us. I grew up in a small communist country behind the iron […]

I will speak this Thursday 4/24/2014 at the BEC Fenestration Symposium in Raleigh, NC. All those who plan to come, please read this article about fenestration. It’s my old article about Glass Coolness published in The Construction Specifier in April 2013. We will talk about this stuff! See you there! Literature pertinent to the topics: Glass […]

Over one year ago I purchased a dilapidated house in Miami. Among many items that required repair, were broken windows. Seeing neighborhood kids throwing rocks at my windows, I realized that the ordinary glass wouldn’t do. I paid extra and reglazed them with polycarbonate glass. It’s something that I recommend to everyone: for approximately $100, […]

Too much transparency may reveal skeletons in a closet and much more…  

Note the dark cracks originating from the upper window corners…

I guess there is not much attention to detail possible with a ~30ft telescopic pole.

Here is a yawning cat in a window in the Rotterdam Cube House, designed by architect Piet Blom. Technically speaking, this is not a window, it’s a skylight, due to its tilt.

Cats have the uncanny ability to jump vertically to negotiate a window via its transom, which is normally ventilated. This is a nice, handmade, wooden, compartment window, a superior design developed in early 20th century, affording good thermal and acoustic properties.

Frosty patterns and ice forming in the vessel standing on the sill.

A little background for our American friends: Europeans suffer from excessively air-tight living spaces (while Americans still busily try to figure out how to increase the air tightness). The typical perimeter hardware of an European window allows for untying the window, securing it with a small gap at the top. In this case, it was […]

In the battle between thermal and visual comfort, the thermal wins.

with a window with outswinging wooden shutters.

Old wooden window with split panes, square cut corners, and wooden lintel. The wall below the sill is built of stone, and the wooden sill and bottom rails of sashes are rotten and covered with moss.

How to invigorate a boring hotel facade, and make people buzz about it? Simple.

Apparently, the fabricator got a wrong width, and the only way to install the window, was to place it diagonally.

Apparently, the fabricator confused height with width, resulting in this in-swinging side-by-side window installed wrong way.

A profession thriving when an alarm clock was hardly affordable.

Wooden compartment window with metal corner keys.

Windows are as old as buildings, the word itself derived from the ancient Norse language in times when Vikings raided North Europe. How to design a window? How should an architectural glass be chosen?  Vikings are long gone, and we found the knowledge remains common among architects in the North Europe, but has not spread much […]