Umeda Sky Building

This guide to Umeda Sky Building traces architect Hiroshi Hara's 1988 sketch of four glass towers linked at the top like laced fingers, and how Japan's bursting economic bubble cut that vision down to the two forty-story towers standing today, built with nothing joining them but empty air a hundred meters up. It follows the unusual engineering problem that created, how to link two towers at that height without ever building a bridge in the sky, and the unconventional attempt made in 1992 to solve it. Ride the glass escalator through the open gap between the towers, and look up at what fills it now.