Within the late 1960's, many individuals in North America turned their attention to environmental challenges, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers had been widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city generally overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.
Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and wasters, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120, 000 kilowatts-enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss (or gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is extra than ten times that by means of a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double-glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that decrease glare together with heat gain. Even so, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city's sanitation facilities, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone create 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each and every year-as significantly as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut , which has a population of additional than 109, 000.
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