A glass panel in my apartment tower's facade has gone foggy — is that mine to fix or the building's?
One of the big floor-to-ceiling glass panels in my apartment has gone permanently foggy between the panes — the classic failed sealed unit. In a villa I've learned you just replace the sealed unit and keep the frame.
But this is different — the glass is part of the building's glass facade (the curtain wall), floor-to-ceiling, and I can't exactly get a glazier to swing by and pop it out from my living room 30 floors up.
So:
- Is a failed panel in the curtain wall *my* responsibility as the apartment owner/tenant, or the building's?
- How does a facade panel even get replaced up high — from inside or outside?
- Who do I raise it with — building management / the owners' association?
Don't want to either get charged for something that's the building's job, or ignore something that's mine. How does this work in a Dubai tower?
3 answers
Short answer: a failed sealed unit in the building's curtain wall is almost always a common-facade matter — raise it with building management / the owners' association, don't arrange your own glazier. The curtain wall is shared building fabric, not your private window, and replacing a facade panel is specialist high-access work done through the building.
Why it's the building's, not yours: the curtain wall is the tower's continuous outer skin — structurally and legally it's usually common property / common facade, maintained by the owners' association through the building's facade contractor. That's different from a villa window (yours) or even an internal partition. So a foggy sealed unit in it is typically reported, not self-fixed. (Check your specific building's rules — some define the glass line slightly differently — but the default is common-facade.)
How it's actually replaced up high: facade panels are changed by a specialist crew using rope access (abseiling) or a building maintenance unit (the cradle on the roof), often working from the outside, sometimes inside depending on the system. It's not a from-your-sofa job — it needs the right access equipment and a matching unit, which is exactly why it goes through the building.
What to do: report it to building management / the OA in writing with a photo, and ask them to log it for the facade maintenance programme. If lots of panels are failing, that's a building-wide facade issue worth raising collectively. The building's aluminium and glass facade team handles the replacement. Has anyone got a facade panel replaced through their OA — how long did it take?
Villa owner so I'm the opposite case — mine *are* my problem — but a friend in a tower had exactly this and yes, it was the building's facade contractor via the OA, done by rope access from outside. He just had to report it and wait for the scheduled facade works. The key thing he learned: don't let anyone talk you into paying for your own "glazier" to fix a curtain-wall panel — you can't safely access it anyway, and it's not your bit of the building. Report and log it.
From a commercial-unit angle it's the same logic — the shopfront/facade glass is usually the building's, the internal stuff is yours. The dividing line is "is it part of the external building skin or inside your demise?" Foggy floor-to-ceiling facade glass is the skin, so it's the building's. Get it in writing to management though — a paper trail matters if they're slow, and if several units have failing panels, raising it together gets the facade programme moving faster.
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