The buildings that make up Industry City were put up as the Bush Terminal freight complex, and their original glazing is still the defining feature of the facades: wide multi-pane steel industrial sash, dozens of small lights to a frame, set directly into concrete and masonry openings. Replacing one of those frames is not a glazing job, it is a masonry job with glazing attached, so our default here is to cut back, de-rust, re-putty and reglaze in place, light by light, keeping the frame that belongs to the building. We carry the small lights in and set them from inside wherever the floor allows it, which on these deep concrete floors it usually does. Where a frame genuinely has to come out, we say so at survey rather than discovering it halfway through, because that decision pulls a mason, a different schedule and a different budget into the project.

Inside, almost everything we are asked for is a tenant build-out in shell space: glazed office fronts and meeting rooms carved out of open floors, glass partitions chosen so a maker or design studio keeps its north light, balustrades on interior mezzanines, and storefront-style glazing facing the interior courtyards and food halls, which behaves like retail glass even though it never sees the weather. The real constraint is the campus rather than the building. Access runs through the management office — certificates of insurance, a booked loading dock and freight elevator, an agreed route across a site full of public foot traffic, and work windows that sit outside the hours when the courtyards and halls are open. We plan a job here backwards from the dock booking, and we would rather hold a delivery a day than put a crated panel on a sidewalk that a few thousand people will walk along at lunchtime. The waterfront exposure on the Second Avenue side gets the same marine-rated fixings and finishes we use anywhere the harbour air reaches.