The Adam Project | Vancouver Convention Centre West — the glass company that sells time

Sorian Technologies needed to look like a firm that could quietly privatise the fourth dimension, and the production found it on the Vancouver waterfront: a long slab of glass and steel leaning out over Burrard Inlet, mountains stacked behind it, seaplanes landing in front. The West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre plays the company that Adam's father's work made possible and that Maya Sorian turned into an empire.

The real building has a better origin story than the fictional one. It opened in 2009 and spent the following winter as the International Broadcast Centre for the 2010 Olympics, beaming the Games out to the world from a room the size of several football fields. On top of it sits a six-acre living roof — more than 400,000 native plants, the largest of its kind in Canada when it was built — with four beehives working it. Below the waterline, the foundation was engineered as an artificial reef, concrete ledges planted so that seaweed, crabs and starfish would colonise the structure.

Walk the perimeter and you get the shots the film uses without paying for a location permit. Jack Poole Plaza sits at the east end, and the Olympic cauldron still stands there, lit for occasions. The seawall runs straight past. Late in the day the glass takes the low sun off the water and throws it back at the North Shore, which is exactly the kind of light a corporation with something to hide would pay an architect for.

1055 Canada Place, Vancouver. Free to walk around, outside and in.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.