Disclaimer: I have never seen this first hand. That said, I personally would never want to live in something like that. Being behind a sheet of glass would make me crazy. My windows are open 24/7. I have turned down jobs because they are in high-rise buildings with office windows that don’t open. I need my breeze. I need my fresh (or even not so fresh in the case of Tokyo) air.

Also, while I surely do not advocate simply tearing down old buildings and wasting all the embedded resources to make way for the new, I wonder what it would feel like to be a person living in one of these dilapidated buildings. With no data to back me up, I am going to guess that the people living in the old Hiroshima building were on the lower end of the income scale. It could be misconstrued as something akin to putting them in an aquarium, erecting yet another barrier between “us” and “them”, almost as if to say “You stay inside your glass cage and don’t think about even *breathing* our air.”

Now obviously that is not how it is meant, but people (like me) may perceive things in strange ways. Just so long as they have considered this as well…