Here are a couple images to better relay what the challenges are:
The issue about floor to ceiling glass in a "typical" office kind of scenario. This happens to be the Library in Paris I mentioned earlier. The space directly behind the skin is employee office space. Having lost the ability to put their desk on the window, some employees choose to put their junk there. Not real attractive (especially when one considers this is of the most expensive buildings in all of France).
We do have a very good idea about what the floor plan for this building is--the ground floor plan was shown in the pre-app posted on line. It looks like this (I added the hatch so show where the upper floor plan would be based on dashed lines):
It is indeed a small floorplate (probably around 7000 sf of office space) and it certainly could work. The challenges though are what we have talked about-the floor to ceiling glass will likely mean pulling all the desks away from the exterior because of the lack of sill-and thus making the space plan less efficient. And because it is a corner lot, it has two blank walls in the back. A lot of buildings in high-rise cities have these conditions (new york, chicago, etc). But Portland has plenty of conventional space which is much more efficient than these quirky kinds of spaces and as a consequence these would likely rent for less money because they may be seen as sub-par. At least historically they would. Perhaps B-Side6 will command cool architecture kind of rents and we will see more of it.
The issue with insulation raised earlier can be seen here:
This is a common condition that occurs in residential construction at a balcony. The issue is not that it can't be done--it happens all the time. The issue is that it is an inefficient way to skin a building because there are lots of places for heat to infiltrate in the summer and for cold air in the winter. (plus the waterproofing is a headache)
Last point about the pt slab and running stuff in the floors mentioned earlier--that happens, but it hasn't happened much in Portland. In some cities it is quite common, like Vancouver BC where this condition is the norm in high rise residential (and architects love it because it cleans up the ceiling a lot). But it is challenging because there is a lot of spaghetti in not a lot of space. Here is an example of a building in Seattle that is very clever about hiding the discharge at the sill (though I don't think this is a pt slab):
Incidentally, this kind of fractal design seen on the skin has a lot of precedent (much before this decade as I have heard some people talk about). Obviously Holst skinned the 937 tower here in a similar way recently, Rafael Moneo had a pretty interesting church skinned like this a decade or so ago, and Harry Weese desgined a Courthouse in Chicago in the mid 70s (to name a few examples of the top of my head):
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