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Meet Rod Milicevic: Rethinking How London Looks After Its Facades

Ask most people what looks after a glass building and they picture someone cleaning it. Rod Milicevic has spent his career arguing that this is exactly the wrong way to think about it, and building the case for something far more considered.

London's skyline is increasingly made of glass. Every year, more of the city's commercial buildings wrap themselves in high-performance glazed facades, engineered systems that manage heat, light, weather and appearance all at once. Yet the way many of those facades are cared for has not kept pace with how sophisticated they have become.

That gap is the thing Rod Milicevic has made his focus. Through his work at Glass Aftercare, he has become one of the more distinctive voices in the capital's facade sector, not by talking louder, but by reframing the question entirely.

From cleaning to care

The distinction Rod draws is a simple one, and it changes everything that follows. A facade is not a surface to be cleaned. It is an asset to be understood.

It is a point he returns to often. A modern glazed facade is doing real work, controlling solar gain, insulating, shaping the identity of the building, and it degrades in ways that are largely invisible from the ground. Treating it as something to be wiped down on a schedule misses almost everything that actually matters about its condition.

That line, from one of his widely read On Point pieces, captures the whole of his approach. The value is not in reacting to failures. It is in paying close, informed attention long before failure is on the table.

The idea of facade preparedness

Where Rod has pushed the conversation furthest is around what he calls the preparedness layer, the space between ticking a compliance box and reacting to a problem.

Most facade activity, he argues, falls into one of those two camps. Compliance answers whether a box has been ticked. Repair answers what has already gone wrong. Neither tells an owner whether their building is genuinely ready for what comes next, financially, structurally, or in terms of the growing weight of regulation and insurer scrutiny.

His answer is to treat facade information as something structured and continuous rather than occasional and scattered. Know the condition. Prove it with evidence. Prioritise what matters. Keep a record that holds up over time. It is a shift he sums up as moving from compliance to continuity.

Why London, and why now

The timing of all this is not accidental. Several pressures are converging on building owners at once: a less predictable climate testing facades harder each year, a tightening regulatory environment around building safety, and a growing recognition, echoed recently by bodies such as RICS, that a building's records and data are becoming a genuine risk-management responsibility.

London sits at the sharp end of all of it. It has one of the densest concentrations of high-value glazed commercial buildings anywhere, many of them now well past their handover date and entering the years when facade care matters most.

It is a characteristically understated way of making a serious point. The buildings that will cope best, in Rod's view, are simply the ones that can answer a basic question: what do we actually know, and can we prove it?

A quieter kind of authority

What sets Rod apart in a sector not short of strong opinions is the tone he takes. His writing and his work share the same quality: measured, plain-spoken, and more interested in getting owners to think clearly than in selling them alarm.

Through his On Point newsletter and his work at Glass Aftercare, he has built a following among the facilities managers, asset managers, engineers and property leaders responsible for London's glass buildings, people who value someone able to explain a genuinely technical subject without either dumbing it down or dressing it up.

It is a reputation built the slow way, one clear idea at a time. Which, fittingly, is more or less how he thinks a building should be looked after.

You can follow Rod and his On Point newsletter on LinkedIn, or read more about how Glass Aftercare approaches facade care at glassaftercare.com.