Blinded by the Light, 2020

Architects do take into consideration the shadows cast by their buildings because of neighbouring properties’ Rights to Light and Sunlight/Daylight criteria, for which most countries have regulations, and because the precisely calculated play of shadow can enhance architectural forms.

Several high-profile buildings designed by well-known architects during the last decade have caused discomfort and damage due to irradiance and concentrations of thermal and visual glare. Popularly known as ‘fryscrapers’ or ‘death ray buildings’, these buildings caught the imagination of the press and public, creating a growing realisation in the architectural and planning community of the potentially severe consequences of uncontrolled solar reflections from the built environment and of the need to assess and mitigate glare in architectural facades.

An example is Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Shortly after opening in 2003, surrounding residents and businesses complained of blinding glare as well as increased indoor temperatures. The surfaces of nearby sidewalks reached up to 60C and visual glare disrupted surrounding traffic intersections. Officials at Gehry’s firm insisted that they had taken possible glare into account, but that curved panels were erected at slightly different angles than called for in their design. Gehry did not seem to have remembered that his design for the Weisman Art Museum (1993) on the Minnesota University campus was criticised for the glare it created for drivers facing its west façade when crossing the Washington Avenue Bridge.

In 2010 it was discovered that the reflective surface and concave design of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, by Rafael Vinoly, which had opened the year before, could act as a collecting mirror which focussed the sun’s rays onto the pool deck below, creating temperatures high enough to scorch hair and burn skin.

In Dallas, the 42-story Museum Tower, designed by Scott Johnson and completed in 2013, reflects such intense light into the neighbouring Nasher Sculpture Center, designed by Renzo Piano, that within two weeks of installation of the Museum Tower’s mirrored curtain wall, the Nasher’s bamboo plantings were killed off by scorching. The reflections also so altered the precisely calibrated solar conditions within the gallery that artworks were threatened, and the light artist James Turrell requested that the Nasher remove his permanent installation there as it had been “destroyed”.

The Sculpture Center has been left to mitigate the glare with internal blinds, leaving inadequate and unattractive lighting conditions for the art.

Designed by Rafael Vinoly in 2005-6 (at probably the same time as Vdara Hotel), and completed in 2014-15, ‘20 Fenchurch Street’ in London – a.k.a. ‘the Walkie-Talkie’, hit press headlines even before it was completed. The concave/parabolic surface of the facade reflected and concentrated beams of sunlight onto parts of the pavement, which reached temperatures in excess of 100 deg. C. The heat melted plastic parts of a motorist’s parked Jaguar, burnt carpets and melted plastic bottles in nearby shops, and incidentally created daily street theatre as crowds gathered to watch eggs being fried on the sidewalk. Vinoly predicted reflections but – apparently in conversation with the Guardian – said, “There was a lack of tools or software that could be used to analyse the problem accurately.”

Renzo Piano’s design of the elegant ‘Shard’ in London, which opened in 2013, was beset by numerous problems of reflection, inside and out, both during daylight hours and at night. Reflections from the facade dazzled train drivers on the south-eastern train tracks leading to the London Bridge Terminal. Internally, embarrassed visitors complained that reflective glass in the loos bounced reflections off ceiling and walls and into and out of other cubicles. At night, guests of the Shard’s Shangri-La Hotel were able to see into each others’ rooms when glass panels protruding from the building’s corners acted as mirrors once internal lights were switched on at night.