[URBAN NOTE] There's some of the gold

[rfmcdonald]

The--apparently--unofficial headquarters of the Royal Bank of Canada, the Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto's Financial District, host a particularly eye-catchingSouth Tower which rises 41 stories or 180 metres. The picture below gives you a bit of an idea of what the entire building looks like, at a more human scale. Pictures of the skyscraper are available everywhere, but below is a picture of opart of the tower at a human scale. Wikipedia explains why the glass hass that cast.

The exteriors of the structures are largely covered with glass; together they have more than 14,000 windows. Each of these windows is coated with a layer of 24 karat (100%) gold. At a cost of about $70 per window, the total value of gold in the windows is over $1,000,000 but, due to the manufacturing technique used to make the glass, the gold is unrecoverable. The gold gives the windows a distinctive colour. Gold was used as an insulator to reduce heating costs.

The Royal Bank's gold.
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Prestige, of course, has nothing to do with the decision to do this to the windows. They also look pretty, mind.

(Oh, and that's me photographing myself.)