With the surging figures in real estate, investors incessantly find ways to maximise spaces in their facilities. As a result, it has become commonplace to walk into a building and see panels create barricades and serve as partitions and internal walls between persons. These partitions can take the form of glasses or aluminium sheets. In this article, we will be emphasising glass partitions or barricades.
What is Glass Partitioning?
Glass partitioning is the use of glass frames or sheets to create a demarcation and cut off an area to create spaces in a room or building. There are makeshift walls that differentiate spaces within a room, hall, or building. Glass partitioning has become a mainstay in the architectural sphere, especially in office designs. It is customary to walk into office buildings, especially banking halls, and find workers clustered in a single room without losing touch of their personal spaces. This is made possible by glass partitions. While workers enjoy their privacy, team-working culture is greatly enhanced as employees are a glance away from each other, thus creating professional and interpersonal affinity in the workplace. Suffice it to say that glass partitioning is not only ubiquitous in the workplace, but it is in our homes, places of worship, relaxation spots, hotel spaces, etc. It is prevalent to find glass partitions as a demarcation between a room and a closet, between the toilet and the bathroom, the disc jockey area and guest stand, the drummer’s seat and the guitarist stand, between the pulpit and the choir stand, etc.
Furthermore, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has made remote work the new normal in business circles, hence the rapid decline in demand for grand office facilities. Nonetheless, investors prefer to rent a room or two and partition them into different spaces to serve various functions instead of renting more rooms for the same purposes. More so, the need to save rental costs has made glass partitioning a vital part of building design.
Why Glass Partitioning
Glass partitions have become the choice frames or panel for commercial buildings due to the numerous benefits it promises. With the high cost of renting building space, glass partitions have become the surest means of bridging the gap between our economic realities and our rental demands. Investors are finding ways to stay afloat by trimming their fixed and recurring expenses to the barest minimum. Using glass partitions saves money on unnecessary rentals and generates more returns on investment. This is great for real estate investors. They can rent out their facilities to more tenants without necessarily erecting new structures. Glass partitioning creates a more bonded working environment while keeping tabs on our personal spaces. When glasses are used as walls in the interior of a workspace, there is greater room for interactions and a coordinated working environment among staff. The interruptions that come with walking into a colleague’s space when he attends to another are reduced.
The distractions that come with noise in an open working space can be a drawback to productivity at work. Glass partitions buffer the effect of noise in an enclosed workspace without totally shutting out interactions among staff.
The effect of lighting is essential in a building, and how they illuminate different parts of the room is very important. Therefore, blocking off the effect of light with concrete walls can easily make a workspace sombre and unappealing to occupants. Glass partitions allow light to travel freely within the workspace, consequently cutting power costs. More so, glass partitions promote flexible design in a building as the panels can be easily taken down and reinstalled to capture new designs and are symmetric.
Furthermore, the need to accord more respect to our personal spaces in line with Covid-19 safety protocols is gradually pushing open workspaces into extinction. The era of boxing everyone in a room without clear cut barriers and demarcations is gradually eroding. But unfortunately, the economic blows dealt by the pandemic have made it increasingly difficult to afford spaces with clearly mapped out rooms to carry out various tasks. To combat the challenges we are faced with, the use of glass partitions helps create the desired spaces we need in our workplaces. This saves us from the double jeopardy of health hazards and contravention of health laws.
Furthermore, maintaining a line of sight at work or within a building is important in gauging productivity and enhancing security. These have been a key factor in promoting open workspaces. There is the assumption that people tend to be more effective when they are closely monitored and exposed to human sight, but this may not augur well for persons who prefer to seclude themselves in a confined space. However, glass partitioning has become seminal in striking a balance between the two.