The glass façade panels of Vertigo cover some ten thousand square meters in total. The windows with green print have been a feature of the Built Environment building for twelve to thirteen years now. Part of the panels has started showing some serious discoloration, as TU/e discovered about three years ago.

Leon van de Vorstenbosch of Management and Maintenance (Real Estate Management): “We’ve discovered the panels have been manufactured using certain pigments that are no longer in use. Those pigments have started oxidizing, and because of that, the glass has become ever browner in places.”

An estimated five to seven hundred square meters of Vertigo panels will be replaced. The new panels take a few months to be delivered. Because of the weather conditions, replacing them in the fall is a bad idea. Van de Vorstenbosch expects the affected panels to be replaced in March of 2016.

In the meantime, the other glass panels will be cleaned and treated with a protective coating. The treatment is supposed to prevent these windows from (further) discoloring and having to be replaced. The major cleaning operation, which started several weeks ago, will last approximately five months.