Comment by rbanffy
17 hours ago
> It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities
In my experience, the biggest issue is natural light - it's hard to beat glass walls when you need a structural skin with some windows where possible.
Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.
The standard passive solar rule of thumb, for traditional windows without those coatings, is to keep glazing to 20% of the floor area to prevent overheating: https://sustainableengineering.co.nz/glazing-percentage-hand...
The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.
Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.