Archinect - News

Chicago Mayor considers scaling back sign limits on office towers to lure Salesforce

2018-09-25T13:21:00-04:00

The 20-foot-tall letters spelling “T-R-U-M-P” on the city’s second-tallest building prompted Chicago aldermen four years ago to regulate the installation of large signs on office buildings. Now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to tweak that ordinance to help secure a huge expansion by software firm Salesforce in a new riverfront skyscraper. The city’s Department of Planning and Development [...] unveiled a plan that would allow larger signs on office towers, depending on how high signs are placed.

Who could forget the epic 2014 spat between Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, backed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and New York-based real estate developer Donald Trump over the controversial "TRUMP" letters on his hotel and condo tower in the city (Kamin's tempestuous relationship with Trump goes even further back)?

Still, the architect's importance is clear

2018-06-06T23:39:00-04:00

Between 2007 and 2013, Fotiadis designed all or part of six Trump-branded developments: a Trump Tower in Kazakhstan; a Trump-branded seaside resort in the republic of Georgia; a 47-story Trump Tower in Tbilisi, Georgia; hotel rooms at the Trump Tower in Istanbul; a Trump movie studio complex in Florida; and major portions of the Trump Parc Stamford, a condominium tower in Connecticut.

Christina Wilkie tries to learn more about architect John Fotiadis (reportedly Trump’s favorite architect). Yet, within hours of being contacted, John Fotiadis (Archinect firm profile) closed down his 10 yr old architecture firm, deleted his portfolio and left Twitter.

h/t @Marcy Wheeler

Trump Tower is blocking off the public from promised public spaces on site

2017-11-28T18:53:00-05:00

Otherwise known as POPS or POPOS, pseudo-public space is often offered up by developers in exchange for the city giving them permission to add more floors or density than the current zoning allows for. An incentive pioneered in NYC's 1961 zoning ordinance revision, today, there are more than 500 spaces in the city legally reserved for public use on privately owned and managed real estate. One of these is the President's gilded Trump Tower.

In the late 1970s, the billionaire real estate mogul made a deal with the city to add restrooms, two upper-level public gardens, and an atrium with a 22-foot long stone bench so he could build 20 more floors onto the-then 38-story building. Shortly after the building's completion, the promised bench, in Trump fashion, was removed leading to a 30-year scandal resulting in multiple fines including one for $10,000 issued by the Department of Buildings. Making matters all the more insulting, the bench's place went to a kiosk hawking the man's self-pro...

RUMP TOW

2017-04-06T14:17:00-04:00

Architecture, we forget at our peril, is inherently violent. It invariably subtracts from the range of available possibilities, especially the perennially attractive option of building nothing at all. In this sense, construction sites are crime scenes. —Herbert Muschamp, NY Times

Three quick takes on architecture, with links, of relevance to a certain tower.

Chicago design firm casts hammy metaphor over Trump Tower

2016-12-06T19:24:00-05:00

New World Design Ltd. has shared a hypothetical proposal that would partially obscure the view of the infamous Trump Tower Chicago sign with four giant, gold-colored balloon pigs. [...] the pigs would be tethered to buoys in the Chicago River and provide “visual relief to the citizens of Chicago,” many of whom are presumably tired of seeing Trump’s name everywhere.

More acts of architectural protest:

The creative arithmetic of Donald Trump's buildings

2016-11-07T12:25:00-05:00

The Republican who would be president has been accused of exaggerating his own height by an inch. To suggestions that he has abnormally short fingers, he has responded by boasting, during a presidential debate, about other parts of his anatomy. He has tried and failed to develop the world’s tallest building at least three times. And when he wants his buildings to seem bigger than they actually are, he enlarges them...with sheer bluster.

For more on the architecture of Donald Trump, follow these links:

Blair Kamin's tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump

2016-10-07T17:38:00-04:00

Over the years, Trump has courted me, comforted me, criticized me and sent me a handful of sometimes-fawning letters and notes. I saved the correspondence. Wouldn't you? [...] And the missives are telling. Combined with other things he's said and written, they show that Candidate Trump isn't all that different from Developer Trump. He remains a master media manipulator who can be charming, mercurial and vengeful. Only now he wants to be the most powerful man on earth.

In this relatively personal piece for the Tribune, architecture critic Blair Kamin recounts his tumultuous personal and professional relationship with Trump over 10+ years, talking (as developers and architecture critics do) about buildings.

Kamin explains that there were times when Trump was supportive (regarding a health issue), and praising of his criticism. But whenever the criticism didn't go Trump's way, he bucked at Kamin. Their back-and-forth frothed to a head in 2009, over Kamin's criticism of Trump's condo and hotel tower in Chicago—before it was emblazoned with the "TRUMP" sign:

"It's a good building," I said, praising the tower's glistening exterior but faulting its uninspired spire and riverfront bulk.

There was a pause.

"Good?" Trump said, sounding shocked. He had "sucked up" to me for all these years, he said, "and all I get is good?"

When Kamin did criticize the TRUMP signage in 2014, Trump called Kamin "dopey" and "a lightweight". Trump lumps Goldberger and Kamin to...

"Steve from Virginia" attempts to scale Trump Tower with suction cups

2016-08-11T13:55:00-04:00

A young man attempted to scale the Trump Tower in New York using suction cups on Wednesday afternoon, creating a social media frenzy in the process. The NYPD attempted to wrangle the urban climber by following him atop window washers' scaffolding and removing entire windows — deconstructive policing, if you will. Yet the nimble man evaded their grasp for more than 2 1/2 hours, getting all the way to the 21st floor.

The man, nicknamed "Steve from Virginia" on Twitter, is apparently a fan of the presidential candidate. In a video manifesto posted on Youtube, he claimed that he's an "independent researcher" and the stunt was intended to get Trump's attention. Trump lives and works in the Tower, although he wasn't on the premises yesterday.

800 feet high and rising

2016-06-08T13:14:00-04:00

By living above 800 feet, Estis and Enkin are two members of an unexpectedly exclusive group in Manhattan. In my estimation, no more than 40 people currently live above that line, scattered among just three buildings... As my elevator descended and my ears popped, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly never take in such a view again. And in fact, maybe nobody will, if these apartments wind up becoming empty investments.

In this elegantly observed and exquisitely written piece, Jon Ronson not only takes in the view of Manhattan at 800+ feet with visits to Trump World Tower, One57, and 8 Spruce Street but looks toward the future of a nation divided by an increasingly intractable wealth gap.

Real estate of the priciest kind:

"Glitz and ego" – the architectural legacy of Donald Trump, the developer

2016-05-18T17:30:00-04:00

“Trump ... believes in using expensive materials that convey prestige and wealth, and people buy into that,” said Jerold Kayden, professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University. He said in some ways the legacy of Trump buildings is a matter of taste. “To some they are the height of ambition and the height of prestige and to others they are gaudy, but he has certainly pioneered with some others architecture as brand.”

"Other New Yorkers view Trump’s investment in luxury buildings in undervalued locations in the '90s as a contribution to New York’s renewal. To them, his construction represented investment at a time when New York was struggling with blight."

What does Donald Trump's architecture reveal about his politics?

2016-02-18T12:44:00-05:00

Adorned with gold and marble, [the Trump Tower] looks like Saddam Hussein went on a shopping spree with Liberace. To make way for its construction, Mr Trump demolished the handsome Art Deco Bonwit Teller department store. He promised to donate its bas-relief carvings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but it turned out they were too expensive to remove so they were smashed to pieces on site instead.

Loud, pushy, indifferent to anything but self-touted glamour: Donald Trump's politics and his buildings share a great deal in common. In this piece, The Financial Times' reigning design critic Edwin Heathcote briefly touches on the repugnant qualities that the Donald's politics and his buildings share, noting that "Mr. Trump’s buildings, unlike his father’s, have failed to make any architectural contribution to the cities around them or address social needs. Instead they pop up like middle fingers disdaining their surroundings. They are less architecture than marketing, with the Trump sign the most important component."

For more coverage on the intersection between architecture and politics:

Old Guy Fight! Tribune’s Blair Kamin vs. Donald Trump

2014-11-20T17:14:00-05:00

Watching two grown men in a social media hissy fit over a building sign is actually a lot more amusing than one might think. In this corner, Donald Trump, rich guy, who, in the view of one esteemed newspaper critic, has defiled our fine city by slapping his name on the side of his silvery, shiny building. In the other corner, Blair Kamin, decorated architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune and defender of building aesthetics.

Chicago Mayor blasts Trump sign as 'tasteless'

2014-06-13T12:24:00-04:00

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin. “Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.

Trump responds in his typical classy style...

Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014