Many aspects of this culture are difficult for westerners to understand at first so I will just tell you what they are without trying to explain most. I myself am not Japanese but have done extensive business with them and for them from time to time. My perspective is therefore as a westerner and it is unlikely that I have picked up all nuances.

These are just the highlights. You will be able to pick up the rest as you go along.

In The Office

This is generally a very formal environment. Specifically, you will find Jacket and Tie. Although jackets may come off while they are at their desk they will put them back on when going to meetings of any kind. Also be aware that they prefer the jacket buttoned. Make sure you button yours and keep it buttoned.

The First Meeting

Be absolutely sure you are carrying a good supply of business cards. They expect to receive one.

• Hold the card in two hands with the type facing the recipient. They do not expect westerners to bow; however you may nod your head if you are comfortable with it. Try to give your card first to their senior person. As you are giving him (and I assure you it is a him) the card: state your name, your position in the company and to whom you report. For those who follow, present the card the same way but only state your name.
• Do not be surprised if the person you meet with does not have a private office. Senior Vice Presidents are often seated in an open office environment with many other workers. It is their preference to be seen working hard by their superiors. Privet office are usually found only with senior executives.
• Address all by last name only followed by san (honorable) e.g., Koji san. They will extend you the same courtesy (first names are reserved for family). You will also find that the western spelling of their name is phonetic and therefore sounds exactly as it is spelled.

Position Is Everything

If you meet in a conference room expect to find the senior member of the group in the center of the table facing the door not at the head of the table. If you all enter the room together make sure your group leaves that center seat empty. Your senior member should sit opposite also in the center. Your group should then sit away from the center in descending order of importance.

Discussion

If there is one or more Japanese in the room that has a strong command of English you are in luck. But it is more likely that:

• Not all Japanese in the room will be proficient in English. This does not mean that they are hard of hearing. Loud talk and exaggerated hand gestures will not increase the level of communication. Speak in a normal voice and direct your conversation to their senior member even if he does not speak your language. Someone will interpret for him as you go along. Don’t let it through you. Also expect that he may ask question through the interpreter. Respond to him not the interpreter.
• There may be many side conversations in Japanese as they discuss your proposal among themselves. They do not wish to be impolite but are trying to fully understand what you said and form a consensus of opinion and understand their senior persons requirements.
• Try to remember that they learned English in school and will not be familiar with all slang. Most are in the west on rotational bases for a few years at a time and will be returning to Japan (they are often called Home Staff).

There is a down side to the interpretation cycle however, you can not be sure that what you said was conveyed properly and that the response they wanted was translated to English properly. Don’t worry; you will work it out eventually.

Tip 1: if you can find a Japanese person in your firm to accompany your team they will be able to tell you after the meeting what the side conversations were about giving you better insight as to what the primary concerns of the group were.

Tip 2: Everything they do is predicated on teamwork. Your group should present themselves as a team that will service the account.

Tip 3: Never directly refuse any of their requirements. Say, it is not something you can decide here right now. They will understand the answer is no. (also see results below).

Results

Do not expect to finalize anything at this first meeting. They will first form a consensus based around the senior persons requirements outside your presents and only then meet again (they love team meetings).

• If after the second time you are presented with something like; “we have to discuss it further ourselves”. They are telling you, “No”. Japanese do not usually give a direct refusal. Go back to the drawing board and sweeten the deal.

Note: Do not be surprised if during a long meeting one or more Japanese sits back, folds his arms and closes his eyes for a few minutes. It is not disrespectful, he is not board and he is not asleep.

The Process

Japanese Business follows a process. Everything and I do mean everything is done step-by-step without shortcuts. You will encounter an approval process that is sometime frustrating and seemingly wasteful but it will be follow to the letter. I have seen Japanese Companies pass up hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives to close a deal by an end of quarter/end of year date. They will not do it! The process is too important.

Business Hours

Business hours are formal as stated above. The business lunch will be conducted in much the same way. That is to say formal. Expect to talk a lot of business.The Japanese work long hours in the west and even longer hours in Japan (usually six days a week). You will generally find them at work to 7 PM or later every evening and often in on weekends.

They will generally not take a day during the week if invited to play golf (they don't even take vacation time in Japan). However, asked to play on Saturday or Sunday they will gladly accept. The Japanese absolutely love golf. Back in Japan they only get to play once or twice a year because of the expense. Only very senior executives can afford club membership back home.

Note: In general, they will not go to anything like a holiday lunch. Quote, “Japanese Business Men only celebrate after working hours.”

Work Is Over – Time To Play

They are generally willing to go out any evening after their working hours and they often do. They are very much into Team Bonding – yours and theirs - when the deal is going to be completed. And look out …. they are wild men. Drink all you want, they will and expect you to do the same. These guys really let their hair down after business hours. And yes, Karaoke really is big at a Japanese party. Unlike western culture, what goes on after working hours stays in after working hours. They do not tell tales in the office the next day.

If you are invited to Tokyo expect to be entertained in the evening. They are somewhat direct and will probably ask you something like, “how loose are you.” Depending on your answer your entertainment could vary widely.

Have a good time; they will!

Related Articles : The Business Dinner   Survival In The Conference Room   The Big Presentation

A few design firms are taking the lead in this area of design research, designing buildings in which the design's success or failure is determined by its relationship to the environment.

Conde Nast Building (Fox and Fowle, New York, 1999)

Built as part of the renaissance of Times Square, the Conde Nast building is also the first ecologically designed North American skyscraper. AT the time of its construction, high-rise buildings rarely addressed environmental issues. Today, many of its innovations are considered standard for office buildings.

A monumental catalyst for the ear, this is the first office building to be developed by the 42nd Street Development Corporation, a public/private consortium established to promote the redevelopment of Times Square. Located on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, the Conde Nast building straddles the glitzy Times Square entertainment area to the west and the corporate Midtown area to the east.

Designed with two distinct faces, the west and north facades respond to Times Square with the glitter and technology of metal and glass, while the east and south facades respond to the corporate context with a historical stone façade, creating, according to the architect's description, a “marriage of pop culture and corporate dignity.”

At street level, the tower's lobby, with its dramatically curved ceiling, connects 42nd and 43rd streets, drawing visitors through the building. Responding to the Times Square zoning ordinance, the building's base is covered with billboards and neon sign age.

This building sets new standards in energy conservation, indoor environmental quality, recycling systems, and the use of sustainable materials. The large glazed-glass areas of curtain wall maximize daylight penetration. The curtain-wall glazing incorporates a low-E coating to filter out unwanted ultraviolet light while minimizing heat gain and loss. Photovoltaic panels are integrated in the spandrel areas on the upper floors of the east and south faces, generating a meager but symbolic amount of electricity by day.

Sophisticated mechanical systems ensure high indoor air quality by introducing filtered fresh air to the office environment. Tenant guidelines produced by the architects established environmental standards for lighting, power usage, furniture systems, carpet, fabrics, finishes, and maintenance materials to ensure indoor air quality, and also to serve as a comprehensive strategy to maintain environmental sustainability for the life of the building.

This pastiche of environmentalism, historicism, futurism, and commercialism creates a complex architectural organism. Indeed, the arguments for energy conservation seem out of place in a neighborhood like Times Square, which is predicated on a spectacular excess of energy-consuming visual pyrotechnics. A difficult first in the realm of ecological skyscraper design, it anticipates the next generation of ecologically sensitive North American skyscrapers.

Deutsche Post AG (Murphy/Jahn, Bonn, 2001)

This sleek tower housing the new headquarters for the Deutsche Post is exemplary of a kind of sustainable design practice that achieves the goal of environmentally sensitive architecture without sacrificing aesthetics or occupant comfort. The tower rethinks the skyscraper as a building type by focusing on the integration of function, technology, and user comfort to create an architecture of “high technology and low energy.”

The tower is made up of two curved semicircular masses connected by glass bridges. The connecting floors, at nine-story intervals, form atrium sky gardens which are naturally ventilated and serve as interior communal spaces. A skylight annex houses additional public spaces at the base of the tower, and is clad in a “smart skin” of glass and integrated photovoltaic panels.

The façade design consists of a twin shell glass curtain wall. The clear glass outer shell allows for natural ventilation, and protects from rain, wind, and noise. The operable inner shell allows occupants to control the local interior climate. Floor to ceiling glazing optimizes daylight penetration and reduces energy consumption through the reduction of interior lighting, while integrated sun shades in the façade cavity control heat gain during periods of direct solar exposure. As the architects point out, the building's roof and façade are no longer surfaces with constant properties, but rather a highly specific system of interchangeable parts that allows the building to adapt to changes in temperature, humidity, light intensity, or acoustics. The architects describe the multi cell roof as “the technical equivalent of the biological skin.”

The building employs an integrated heating and cooling radiant-slab system, taking advantage of the thermal storage capacity of concrete. Additional heating and cooling systems assist with interior climate-control during summer and winter months.

Utilizing a computerized building management system, the building monitors its climate and controls all of the components to optimize its “operational mode.” The intelligent building creates its own equilibrium with the exterior environment through constant feedback. Careful monitoring reduces redundant lighting and conditioning, providing these only as required, and significantly reducing operating costs.

The collaboration between Jahn and Sobeek produces what they call “archi-neering,” a seamless integration of architecture and engineering design. The design for the Deutsche Post building achieves new levels of design integration with technology, in order to create smarter and more responsible architecture. Jahn describes this environmental optimization by stating, “Nothing must bed added, and nothing can be taken away.”

Adia Headquarters (Kohn Pederson Fox International, Abu Dhabi, 2004)

The curvilinear headquarters building for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) combines a sensuous formal vocabulary with a low energy design strategy appropriate to the Middle Easter climate. The building mass is draped in a glass curtain wall that folds in and out of the tower, transforming from the taut skin of the exterior envelope to the inner liner of the internal atrium.

The building is sited in a green fringe of the city, close to the sea. Its curved form gestures to the waterfront on the west, with elevators and other services concentrated on the east. The tower consists of two wings connected by an elevator core and a setback atrium. The building mass is camouflaged by the undulating ribbon like surface that projects above the tower, culminating in a sail like projection on the north façade.

The curtain wall consists of a double façade of clear glass that admits natural light and air while cutting down on the amount of solar heat gain. The taut glass skin transforms on the west façade with the introduction of horizontal sun-shading devices. The interior atrium is conceived as a series of stacked sky-gardens that act as passive means to regulate humidity and temperature, as well as contributing to a sense of community.

The architects describe the form of the tower as a “rethinking of the tall office building in a changing cultural, social, and environmental context.” The organic form of the tower seems to be derived from a concern with the fluid forces in the context, rather than a rigorous internal logic. Indeed the curvilinear geometry of the floor departs from conventional space-planning modularity. The combination of bold sculptural form a sensitive environmental systems makes the tower a benchmark in the ecological design of the skyscraper.

RWE Headquarters (Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner, Essen, 1996)

The glassy RWE Tower in the predominantly low-rise city of Essen, Germany, stands out due to its slender proportions and light materials, as well as its role as a pioneering work of sustainable design. Designed by the firm of Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner, the tower utilizes sophisticated building systems, allowing it to consume less energy while still providing a comfortable, naturally lit and ventilated interior environment.

The cylindrical tower is sited in the middle of a landscaped park, surrounded by a lightweight pergola structure that defines the street edge. The tower itself consists of two volumes, the cylinder housing the office spaces and an adjacent elevator tower. The cylindrical plan allows all the offices to be located at the perimeter, guaranteeing access to natural light and air, while a service core and conference rooms occupy the center.

A “breathing double façade” system allows the occupants to benefit from natural light and air, without adding to the cooling and heating loads of the mechanical systems. The curtain wall is made up of a compartmentalized double layer of floor-to-ceiling glass. The outer layer is formed by a taut skin of low-iron glass with an innovative horizontal mullion, which acts as an airflow valve and ventilates to the exterior. The compartments are accessible from the inside via sliding-glass doors, allowing occupants to control the amount of fresh air let in.

The building-management system monitors exterior climate data in relation to the interior temperature, and makes adjustments accordingly. Mechanized sun shades are integrated into the façade cavity and automatically raise or lower to control heat gain on the façade. Exterior sensors warn occupants to close their windows when it rains, or if it is particularly windy. Other systems allow for harvesting energy from roof-mounted photovoltaic panels.

Ingenhoven Overdiek und Partner describe their design criteria as “efficiency, ecological consciousness, economy of resource usage, and build ability.” The RWE Headquarters is an example of an integrated-systems building that pioneered new technologies in façade design, energy efficiency, and sustainable materials. Its “smart-façade” system addresses the apparent conflict between thermal conservation and daylight illumination through the use of clear glass and integrated mechanical systems.

110 Bishopsgate (Kohn Pedersen Fox International, London, 2005)

110 Bishopsgate is part of a new generation of high-rise buildings approved for construction in the City of London. The environmentally sensitive and structurally articulated tower is expressive of the technologies that enable it.

The project is located on the eastern edge of the old city, on a prominent site at the junction of Bishopsgate and Chamomile Street, and across the street from the Georgian church of St. Botolph. It forms part of a cluster of office buildings that includes the NatWest Tower and the 30 St. Mary Axe. The recent crop of office buildings in London corresponds to a demand for large floor plates to provide flexible office space in the center city. It also responds to the evolution in expectations of what a contemporary office building should be with regard to the working environment that it creates and the approach to energy consumption and sustainability.

A perimeter service core on the south organizes the building, allowing open plan offices to benefit from exposure to the west, north and east. The service core acts as a buffer against solar exposure to the south, while allowing for continuous and unobstructed working spaces on the north side. Responding to the technical and social demands of the modern workplace, the building is organized as a vertical armature of flexible spaces.

Office spaces are clustered around multistory atria that the architects call “villages,” allowing tenants flexibility in renting either a single floor or multiple floors connected by internal stairs. Other amenities include retail and restaurant spaces at grade and a public restaurant at roof level.

The east and west facades, clad in clear glass, allow occupants to control the amount of fresh air ventilation, while reducing the amount of solar heat gain in through the glass. The building's structural skeleton is expressed on its north façade, framing the atria.

Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox International, the firm's London office, 110 Bishopsgate represents the translation and adaptability of the high-rise office building type to central London and the implementation of demands for flexible space as well as environmental sensitivity.

Honorable Mention:

The Hearst Tower, New York City

Hearst Tower is the first building to receive a Gold LEED certified rating for "core and shell and interiors" in New York City. The structural steel in the construction contains over 90% recycled material and 50% of the tower's water usage - for the cooling system - comes from a 14,000 gallon rainwater tank.

Dong Bu Headquarters (Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, Seoul, 2002)

Designed as the new headquarters for a Korean insurance company, this tower expresses the confidence and exuberance of the pre-1997 Asian economic boom. Employing a language of angular planes, the designers create a dynamic form that distinguishes it from the other office towers lining Teheran Road in Seoul, Korea.

While most buildings stand on the properly line to maximize their bulk, Dong Bu Tower sits towards the back of the site to create a small urban plaza that acts like a pedestal from which to view the building as a sculptural object.

The broad face of the tower is made up of a series of sloped, folded planes, which make the tower appear to be undergoing a process of transformation. All the east and west walls are clad in blue glass with closely spaced horizontal stainless-steel mullions. At the corners, these walls extend beyond the edge of the building, reinforcing their planar reading by presenting an exposed edge of the surface. The north and south walls are clad in a taut clear glass with corrugated shadow boxes in the spandrel areas.

The ground floor lobby is linked to the subway system and to an underground retail network. Escalators take the visitor up to the limestone and wood-clad lobby. A decorative glass storefront wall, derived from traditional Korean quilting patterns, allows diffused light into the lobby.

The tower's bold sculptural form sets it apart from the city fabric, making it a signature landmark building.

GPA Gasometer Tower (Coop Himmelblau, Vienna, 2001)

Recently this firm has been winning competitions and building its visionary designs, promoting the architects to change their name from Himmelblau to Himmelb(l)au, or heavens-build. One of their first large realized projects is the GPA Gasometer tower, which, true to their radical imagery, has a distinctly imparted form.

As part of the redevelopment of Vienna's industrial quarters, the government held a series of competitions for the reuse and redevelopment of several large and obsolete infrastructure works. The firm won the commission to transform a series of classically designed former gas containers into a mixed used complex of shopping, office, and residential structures.

The existing industrial structure is converted into radial residential units, while a new structure is located on the northern side. The new structure, a bent curvilinear slab, echoes the cylinder, but interprets it in new materials and new geometrics. Its combination of facets and curves suggests a deformation of a familiar form, rather than the presence of something altogether new. The design is interpretive of to context, the results of a formal process of deformation and transformation.

Roppongi Tower (Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, Tokyo, 2003)

The Roppongi Tower forms the massive centerpiece of a 27 acre redevoplment project in the heart of Tokyo's Roppongi retail and entertainment district. The 58 story tower house three million square feet of office space in its shaft and an art museum at its top. Also part of the development is a 550 room hotel, a performing arts theater, and a shopping mall.

The tower derives its unusual shape from a design process that is dictated by its immense size. The tower is so large that the city authorities feared that it would disrupt the television broadcast signal from Tokyo Tower.

The architects looked to origami for a language of folded planes that could inform the shape of the tower. In plan, the tower is an oblong shape made up of various curved line segments that crease and peel, breaking up the tower's mass. The base of the tower's shaft is gathered through a series of facets to accommodate the larger public facilities. The tower's articulated crown will house the Mori Art Center in its top five floors.

The curtain wall consists of lightly reflective glass and painted, pre-cast concrete panels. The material selection was designed to avoid metallic surfaces that would reflect the television waves.

The sculpted mass of the tower minimizes its presence through the selection of its material and the manipulation of Its surface. The tower employs strategies analogous to those of the stealth bomber, which is invisible to radar due to its angular geometry.

Hotel Nova Diagonal (Dominique Perrault, Barcelona, 2004)(Designed)

Dominique Perrault's design for a new hotel along Barcelona's Nova Diagonal consists of a dynamic composition of slab elements suspended in the process of slipping past one another. Perrault conceived of the hotel as a composition made up of two parts: one horizontal, relating to the low scale of the existing city fabric, and the second vertical, relating to the monumental scale of the civic landmarks.

The horizontal podium will house the hotel's public spaces, including the lobby, conference rooms, swimming pool and bar. The upright vertical slab will house the hotel rooms, each with a view towards either the sea or the mountains. The lobby is entered across a bridge that spans a sunken garden, which corresponds to the footprint of the hotel bar hovering above. The underside of the suspended bar aligns with the top of the podium roof, creating the sense that the individual parts of the tower have slipped and then interlocked like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The tower was designed to be clad in a system of metal panels, perforated with an array of circular windows. The slender slab refuses the familiar grid of mullions and glass, appearing instead as a porous and diaphanous volume. The windows consist of red, blue, and green glass distributed randomly across the façade, creating the effect of a large stained glass window. From within the hotel rooms, Barcelona will be viewed through the array of circular windows, transforming the city into a framed mosaic.

Perrault's implied tectonic slippages give the viewer the sense that the tower is frozen in a moment of transformation. The gestures of its implied movement allow the tower to create relationships to its urban context, while the use of porous material gives the impression of dramatic weightlessness.

Parkhaven Tower (Kohn Pederson Fox Associates International, Rotterdam, 2002)

The design for Parkhaven Tower, a new high-rise development along the River Mass in Rotterdam, is derived from a design process that involves the gentle transformation of the tower's shaft as it rises. The mixed used tower will house office functions at the base and residential accommodations above. IT will be a focal point of the new master plan for the area and, it is Europe's tallest tower.

The tower's dramatic spiraling form is derived from a torque triangular plan. The design is based on an equilateral triangle, in which each side of the triangle has been modified into a compound curve. The tower's form is derived by tapering and rotating the triangular footprint of the tower as it rises. The resulting form is sculpturally bold and vaguely biomorphic.

The tower was conceived with the help of extensive computer modeling software, which allows the design of complex forms that would have been difficult to document with conventional two-dimensional tools. The tapering and torquing of the tower are modeled, manipulated and visualized in the computer. Complex three-dimensional forms can be documented and quantified in the construction process by sophisticated software that is shared with the contractors.

At the base, the building's skin peels away to create petal like canopies. These botanical references inform the massing of the tower and the articulation of its elements. Processes like flowering, blooming. Sprouting, and rotating are generative of the tower's language.

Hong Kong Shangai Back Headquarters (Foster & Partners, Hong Kong, 1985)

The de facto cathedral to Hong Kong's Commerce. Hong Kong Shangai Bank Headquarters plays a critical symbolic role in the image of the city. Foster's striking steel and glass tower stands in sharp contrast to the bank's former headquarters, a monumental structure symbolic to the community's financial stability.

The building was conceived as a modular system, consisting of megatruss armatures and suspended infill modules. The suspension structure allows for column-free banking walls, while building services, elevator banks, and fire stairs are located on the perimeter.

The building occupies a site of almost spiritual significance in the geomantic atlas determining Hong Kong's fortunes. According to Feng Shui principles, the flow of energy from the peak of the harbor is critical to the financial well-being of the city.

The Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building epitomizes the high-tech strategy of design through its celebration of building technology, assembly, and methods of construction.

Century Tower (Foster and Partners, Tokyo, 1991)

This tower is often criticized as generic and placeless, the high-rise office building suffers from programmatic banality - office space is homogeneous, repetitive and largely generic. Century Tower proves a rich exception to the norms of the speculative office building type. Within the Tower's articulated shaft are house a mix of uses and amenities, including a museum, tea house, health club, restaurant, and office space. The expression of the building's diverse parts becomes the central theme of the building.

Century Tower extends concepts first explored in the Hong Kong Shangai Bank. Its façade is articulated as a series of eccentrically braced frames that span across the site to allow for a column-free office space, but also respond to Tokyo's stringent seismic engineered requirements. The tower is broken into two layered blocks joined by an open internal atrium. Each block consists of stacked double-height office floors bridging between structural frames. The atrium connects all the office spaces and creates a sense of community.

At the foot of the atrium a staircase leads to a museum for the client's collection of oriental antiquities at basement level. A health club and a pool are housed under curved galls sky-light that slips in under the tower's braced frames. Century Tower celebrates the skyscraper as an assembly of different parts, both structural and programmatic. The various building components are clearly visible from the outside, articulating the building as an architecture of inventory of coexisting programs.

Debis Headquarters (Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Berlin, 1999)

The Debis Headquarters forms the centerpiece of the 1990's redevelopment of Berlin's Potzdamer Platz. Master-planned by Renzo Piano and Christoph Kohlbecker, the urban-renewal projects have transformed an area left desolate by the Cold War back into the vibrant cultural and commercial center that it was prior to the Second World War

Piano conceived of the Tower as a hybrid building with a horizontal slab, vertical tower, and open court-yard, carefully combining object and void. The mass of the building is broken up into a composition of discrete blocks, organized as bundles of parallel slabs rising to different heights and culminating 350 feet (106 meters) skyscraper on the southern end of the site. The atrium is a semi-public central void that invites people into the building and brings natural light into its center.

The facades are made up of layers of delicate screens and operable glass panels filtering out the sun while allowing for natural light and ventilation. The “opaque” facades are made up of prefabricated terracotta screens that are held in front of an operable insulated-glass curtain wall.

The “transparent” or “ventilating” façade consists of a layer adjustable glass louver that can be closed to trap an insulating layer of warmed air, or partially opened to remove warm air through convection. In addition to the energy-saving approach to the design of the facades, the juxtaposition of the terracotta and glass screens gives the building a visually rich texture.

With a building of innovative composition and careful detailing, the Debis Headquarters project anchors one and of a redevelopment project celebrated for being regenerative and reconciliatory, and for healing the wounds on the city and the psyche.

New York Times Headquarters (Renzo Piano, Building Workshop, New York, 2000)

The decision to build a new headquarters for The New York Times west of Times Square marks a decisive return by the company that gave Times Square its name. Times Square has been the site of large-scale urban renewal since the mid-1990's, when new legislation and private funds were used to drive out the peep shows and strip club area, making way for family entertainment.

The selection of Renzo Piano as the architect for the 52 story, 748 feet (228 meters) The New York Times headquarters was the outcome of an international design competition. Piano's design for the tower as a rectangular volume with a layered façade systems stands out for its deceptively simple massing and elegant exterior. The curtain wall is designed to use clear glass behind veil-like layers of thin ceramic cylinders captured in steel frames, and held two feet off the glass. Piano's design celebrates the detail while maintaining a disciplined design vocabulary.

Behind the screens, the activities within will be visible through the façade. Glass-enclosed stairs located on the perimeter will animate the facades with the movement of people. On the ground floor, a large internal garden will open the building up to the public, drawing the city into the lobby and providing amenities such as an auditorium, restaurants and shops.

Bank of China (J.M. Pei & Partners, Hong Kong, 1989)

The abstract sculptural form of the Bank of China stands out from the thick forest of skyscrapers that made up Hong Kong's eclectic skyline.

The building's sculptural form is derived from the correspondence between the tower's volumetric expression and its structural system, a triangulated perimeter tube truss. The tower's volume fills out the triangulated frame in a stepped bundle of prismatic volume that culminates in a 1,209 foot (369 meters) peak and twin masts. The legibility of the system of support is the source of its dramatic visual strength.

The frame systematically distributes the building's loads and transfers them to four composite corner columns. A fifth column extending through the center of the tower transmits its loads from the top of the apex down the prow and transfers them out diagonally, leaving the interior of the base of the tower column-free.

The glass-and-metal tower rests on a three-story granite base, which house the banking hall. A multistory glass atrium connects the banking hall to a skylight at the first setback. The site for the tower is sloped and extremely tight, resulting in access from two different levels. The tower is integrated into a network of abstracted Chinese gardens, which include cascading pools of water and distinctly formed Chinese stones.

The originally intended X-bracing on the facades was perceived as an aggressive and negative gesture. Although bank officials ignored the warnings of local Feng Shui masters, Pei chose to conceal the horizontal member, transforming the X into auspicious diamond shapes. The tower is still regarded with reservation by many locals, who claim that its sharp corners direct negative energy towards its neighbors.