A façade of some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm) was employed. The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound and enable the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery. To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass. The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy. Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.
Through the ages, the professional users of tools by and large have not needed to, been able to, or wanted to talk to outsiders about their implements. They did not need to because tools themselves are used to make other tools, and thus users could very often fashion a new tool with their old ones. If they did need to communicate the design for a new tool to someone outside their trade, they could do so without having to reveal the tool's intended use...Besides, the inventive process of conceiving a new tool was often a nonverbal one. Finally, craftsmen were unwilling to share information about their specialized tools because to do so would have been to give up their competitive edge and their value to those outside the craft.