There is a particular kind of dishonesty in a glass building. It promises transparency — look, you can see everything, the structure says, there is nothing hidden here — while in practice it delivers the opposite. The reflective curtain wall turns the city back on itself, a mirror that shows only what the building chooses to reflect. I spent two weeks last winter in the lobby of the Kuro Bay Terminal, watching the light move across Rina Sato's perforated steel skin, and I kept thinking about how much more honest that building was than the glass boxes across the harbour.
The glass tower did not arrive by accident. It was a deliberate ideological project, born in early glass-and-steel workshops and refined in the postwar corporate boom. Its applied mullions, polished lobbies, and endless reflective skins express an idea about what modern industry wants to project. The ornament is structural, or at least it pretends to be.