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According to Professor Dan Harvey of the University of Toronto, all-glass buildings should never be built. In a recent interview, Harvey details the (not-so-surprising) reasons why. Many new buildings are designed with primarily glass exteriors, lack operable windows and require extensive air conditioning, yet somehow manage to be considered green. Harvey:

There’s no way you can make an all-glass building green. There’s no such thing as a green SUV. You shouldn’t be building SUVs in the first place; you shouldn’t be building all-glass buildings in the first place. And no amount of high-tech or fancy stuff can turn an inherently bad design into a green building.

I agree with Harvey: we need to rethink what it means to build green. His proposed solution is to create consumption-based standards for buildings, which would take into account energy (per square foot per year) for all heating and cooling systems that the building will require. These consumption-related standards would be particularly useful when deciding between retrofitting an already existing structure and building new.

These [all-glass] buildings are uninhabitable without massive air-conditioning systems…And the problem is, these buildings we’re stuck with for 50, 100, I don’t know how many years. I mean, even a coal power plant is only going to last 40 years. A brain-dead building – and that’s almost all we’re building – is going to last 100 years.

Full interview here.