Condos have become human art exhibits

“Hey, they got new couches,” I say as we drive along the Gardiner looking into condo living rooms only a few metres away. “I think they’re going to regret those trumpet lamps though. Is that a guy thing?”

I do this because I can. But why would you allow me to?

Inside Toronto’s glass towers nuzzled up against each other, owners have no privacy. They’re Edward Hopper’s nighthawks. This might be because they’re exhibitionists — the same way earnest young architects love Brutalist cement barns because they’re a blank backdrop for one’s own gloriousness — or because they didn’t think things through.

Meanwhile, strangers stuck in traffic mock your throw pillows.

Glass was precious once. In 1696, England imposed a window tax — windows were easy for tax collectors to count — and glass became a status symbol for the rich. But glass is cheap now and developers use it lavishly, pushing it as fashionable. Beware fashion. The condos of the truly rich look sturdier, have smaller windows and a lot of architectural detailing. They don’t want your glass menagerie.

When owners of $8.6-million glass condos in London realized that visitors to Tate Modern’s new viewing gallery could stare straight into their homes, they protested at having become a human art installation.

The Tate’s director sneered and told them to buy “net curtains.” This was a class-based insult, a real whack at the knees. Only peasants like privacy apparently.

Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times’ architectural critic, recently wrote a fine essay on “glass, class and transparent lives,” and I was happy because glass is now so omnipresent that no one discusses its malign effects.

Glass condos were sold as regal — you can look out over your spread — until you realized everyone could see in.

Homes need walls. That’s what makes them homes. A window is not a wall; it is also not sturdy. Badly installed, it falls and shatters in the streets. Partly thanks to warping — on the increase from extreme temperatures — those condo “walls” will have to be replaced every few decades. With a bit of neglect, a whole area becomes a slum.

As Heathcote writes, glass architecture began in Britain with buildings like the Palm House at Kew in 1848 and the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. Those were sturdy walls of smaller framed windows, but look at the landmark glass cube Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, he writes. It’s a symbol (the actual shop is underground) of how sinisterly transparent our lives are turning out to be.

Heathcote writes gently that the suburban curtain-twitching mocked by the Tate is actually being neighbourly in Jane Jacobs style. You know your neighbourhood and who’s in it, and this is what led the backlash against Airbnb. The bricked Tate overlooks your glass home, but you can’t see into the Tate. Who’s the ogre now?

“There was always an ethical dimension to transparency, the opening up of everyday life to the world, the throwing open of the metaphorical curtains,” writes Heathcote.

This is why Berlin’s new Reichstag has “glazed chambers,” for a confident citizenry, no Nazis governing here. But we didn’t give explicit permission to have our personal lives exposed. It just sort of happened.

Our Google searches are tracked, our Uber rides monitored. We’re on CCTV outdoors. We get mass text messages from the Ontario Provincial Police who tracked cellphones in the vicinity of a murder recently. Employers read our private emails. Twitter and Facebook were meant to be liberating, but now they’re OMG.

What was the worst part of Ontario prisoner Adam Capay’s solitary-confinement torture? Was it the 24-hour-aday lights or his barred Plexiglas cell? What monster devised his life under glass like a bug in a museum display?

Glass walls enable surveillance by weird neighbours, which is something women should consider. I have stalkers, so there are three layers of blinds on some windows of my house. I like light but I block anyone peering in.

At some point, condo owners will grow sick of transparency and buy blinds, which rather negates the purpose of the glass room. Then you wouldn’t have strangers deploring the weird brotherin-law sleeping on your couch, or what the dog does when you’re out.

Or the way you have sex. Trust me, you’re not doing it right. She is done with you. I can see the look in her eye. She’s getting up to leave.