Tenants Drawing the Blinds in Their Glass Buildings

Shaded Window Area by Direction of the Sun

In a small, rather anecdotal, study conducted by New York’s Urban Green Council, researchers focused on 55 residential and commercial buildings dispersed through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Over three months, they collected photos of the exposed sides of each building and took note of the direction that the windows faced and the time of day that they were photographed.

The researchers found that, on average, blinds or shades covered 59% of these buildings’ window area, and more than 75% of buildings had more than half of the window area covered. Furthermore, tenants weren’t opening or closing the blinds based on the time of day: approximately the same fraction of window area was covered regardless of the position of the sun.

Buildings in the study were selected based on whether they were easily photographed from the street, and researchers only ended up with around 107 photos, but what they found seems to have a shade of truth. The windows that tenants pay a high price for often end up covered for reasons other than getting too much light; researchers suggest “perhaps it’s privacy, or the inconvenience of raising them once they are lowered.”

Considering all the well-documented drawbacks of over-glazing—from increasing heating and cooling loads to causing bird fatalities—the Urban Green Council says it may be time to rethink all that glass that just ends up as an inconvenience.