Partial Glass Brick Chimney

I am finally getting around to putting some photovoltaic panels under the bracing Australian sunshine that hammers down on my roof (not nearly so attenuated by stratospheric ozone as your watery northern-hemisphere sunshine).

However, the people who built my house, back in 1901, put up a brick chimney so tall that you could build an extra storey on the house without extending it, if you felt so inclined.

Like a gigantic gnomon, this sweeps the roof each day with its shadow.

Now, in practice, we will get around the worst effects of this shading by using micro-inverters.

In theory, however, it would be much better to replace some, but not all, of the chimney's bricks with glass ones, fixed with glass mortar.

First, this would create the momentary, corner-of-the-eye illusion of a stack of unsupported bricks high above the house. The cut-off would be ragged, with one or two courses containing both glass and opaque bricks, as if to suggest that individual bricks might be falling off as you watched.

Second, it would have a dappling effect on the sunlight, a bit like that of a dimpled beer mug. Dimpled beer mugs are good.

The inside of the glass, at least, ought to stay clean, because what's under the chimney is no longer a wood fire but a gas one.

The residual stack of opaque bricks resting on top of the glass ones could be embellished with a bit of plaster sculpture so that it actually had a gigantic gnome on, possibly aping King Kong.