thanks for posting this, i wondered how nicolai would find a way to talk nice about it.
i do agree about some of his massing comments. it does work in a nice way with the surrounding context, subtley subverting the traditional curtainwall box or neo-traditional blocks that developers erect....but.
and this is where his critique politely left off. but, this project suffers from the most horrid forms of poor detailing. the cheap curtainwall and awkward resolution of the exterior mullions and glass lend the overall playfulness of the project a horridly unresolved and hamfisted level of thoughtfulness that i'm sure the new tenants will learn to decry and later generations will sadly hang their heads and state the downfall of modern architecture to. the game of blue glass comes across as little more than a cheap parlor trick rather than a slick orchestration by a master magician. in the end it hides little more than a conventional curtainwall pattern would have. the shaping of the building, although potentially a beautiful billowing of the form to take maximum advantage of buildable area could have become an amenity to the apartments within, creating spectacular new views or interesting disjuncts between the skin and the structure. sadly again, the hamfisted execution provides little more than awkward angled surfaces and strangely inappropriate apartments that do not gain anything from the playfulness of the form. this project in an incredible expression, i feel, of the failures of the formalist school. by singly exploring form, without a viewed responsibility toward the built object, and without a sense of it's cost in relation to what is bought with its expense....it sells itself short and becomes another awkward developer project. i hope that some of the students that tschumi taught at columbia might learn some lessons from this project and understand that technical sophistication in computer modelling is not enough, but one must also take on the responsibility for gaining the technical sophistication within architecture's execution, or at least get a good consultant for it, in order to truly make these formal leaps into something more than just another architect's delusional ego statement.
It Sucks....I want a tower comission! This crap could have been built in the late 60's.....Take a look at the Boston Bank Building. What is wrong have people really fallen asleep?
The high-design luxury residential towers marching across Manhattan pose a problem for an architecture critic. What if I should fancy one? Isn’t that just what its developer is hoping? A critic can’t help but feel a bit queasy, teetering on the edge of becoming a real estate promoter.
It still sucks....what has the bank of boston offered the boston skyline....tis the same as this piece of garbage....sorry so many cad monkeys were burned out on this pile of dung.
yeah - i kind of like it too. Sure it's chunky and clumsy, but it's also got a cheekyness to it. It's like an Alsop project. It's ok to have one around, just don't want a city full of them
Sorry , --- this is no saur complain about architects in general; there are some young ones who understand the new tools, the new way's to realise the structure . but realy there also are some old men , who kind in dispair and by some freaky order, are so close minded that all they can emagine, are to twist the forms into meaningless attitude, useless forms shouting their messeage that these architects fail to understand the structure as anything but surface and spetacular silli attitude.
As the old men reached an ompossible wall impossible to climb, as that would mean fantasy and visions ,instead they torture the forms into meaningless attitude and is totaly blind towerds the structure ; it's like the inspiration failed them so they kick the scale model and attemt a fake form language, where what they didn't realise is that architecture has to change, it can not stay as the trivial building core build as it alway's was build, just with a strange new form --- these manifest only the lack of visions and a fake form language ; there are nothing wrong with "a meaning" , and it is allright to shape and form different. But that ability don't come from the need of further meaningless torture of the forms, it come with the new possibilities in new technikes and new way's to put things together.
but i wouldn't blame tschumi in this case. the developer-project aspect weighs heavy on this one. comparing this to tschumi's new project at the university of cincinnati - which is clever in its use of material to generate form, respond to its environs, and inform its fenestration - i almost wonder whether there's enough of tschumi in 'blue' to pass a dna test.
this being a project for a developer does not necessarily release it from crticism in regards to detailing. if tschumi did allow the CM to detail the project, that is a serious oversight in his design strategy and should be held accountable for it as much as the building form itself.
as for SWs comment, i haven't seen the project at U of C, but his other new york project at columbia is very similarly poorly detailed. maybe he finally got lucky on the U of C project and had a CM to detail that project that actually knew what they were doing for once.
i suspect that the UC bldg had a local architect of record on board that saw it through CD's and CA. design focused offices (read: those that don't usually typically produce CDs for larger projects) seem to do best when paired up with a solid architect of record...please excuse my generalization.
otherwise, the bldg form is what it is, take it or leave it, but you can't argue that it looks like a poorly detailed cheap curtain wall upon close inspection. a friend of mine remarked this weekend as we walked past Blue that it looked like it was from a decade or two ago...
i think you'd also have to admit that the quality of construction
in new york city isn't always that great... requires a lot of CA
and such. the blue building was probably not ever going to be
all that well detailed to begin with given the constraints of the system
they had to use due to budgetary restrictions...but that also falls
on the architect as well.
i believe the building someone mentioned 'down the street' is the
building next door by narchitects...which is an interesting
juxtaposition.
i didn't know we had so many detail fetishists amongst us. by that measure, we should all love renzo piano and hate oma. outside of the detailing, i can't really gather why there is such a negative reaction to the building here. the form is sculputural, but is in no way anti-urban. i haven't seen the building up close, so i have no idea what the detailing is like, but i think the curtain wall on the whole is refreshing from the more standard curtain walls you see these days (read: boring corporate, som curtain wall). the building to me is idiosyncratic in a way all architecture should be, not polished to the point where all life is robbed from it. if this is so terrible, i wonder what you would consider a "good" tower?
AP, i don't know what you mean that it doesn't look like a poorly detailed cheap curtian wall upon closer inspection. there are definitely far better examples than this, even in terms poor level developer work. the mullions are overly chunky, the form poorly resolved in relation to the curtianwall pattern...the overall pattern is clumsy, the depth of the mullion distracts from the subtle blue patterning that is "supposed" to mask the need for opaque panels at floors, columns, and vertical distribution. the squarish profile of the mullion caps used recalls typical suburban office park curtainwall.
just knowing a bit about curtainwall i feel this could have been much more successful with just a little research into what is possible within a standard kawneer or wausau system.
i mean, haven't these guys heard of suppressed mullions, profiled mullion caps, maybe even just looking at different proportions for the glass pattern that migth fit with the form better?
as for curtainwall, most of that is completed by guys that do nothing but curtainwall in new york...and actually they're going to be better than most in that department. i think you can expect a stronger execution from curtainwall than most other building systems here. plus, by its very nature it has to be very well coordinated by the manufacturer. so it doesn't require as much CA as you might think. at least not when it's the only exterior material. actually this project must have been pretty dumb and simple. same mullion profile all around, right glass sizes, okay got that detail for this odd angle corner......hmmm. let's check out that clip angle detail to the floor structure, looks good.
i'm sorry, maybe i expect too much....but then again, if this guy's so famous, shouldn't i have expectations?
and one other thing. i wouldn't consider myself necessarily a detail fetishist. i love work by oma that is intentionally raw and unresolved. i also love work by renzo piano, especially when it isn't overly fetishized. i just have a belief that concept is not enough (i've seen too much bad architecture excused by concept), and that one has to strive to adjust one's execution strategy to most closely approximate the project's conceptual goals. in this case i feel that the project itself (whether intentionally or unintentionally) suggested a more ambition goal than what was executed...and it's failure was in execution related to the development of detail. now this is a common theme in tschumi's work, and i have often excused it saying he's young, he's not done this before, he's not there yet, but i'm tired of excusing his inabilities as an architect. even though i still respect him as a designer and a theorist. it's sort of like the same feeling i have toward eisenman, if eisenman never builds another building but just draws them, the world will be a better place. maybe i need to see a good example from tschumi to keep me from lumping him into the aforementioned's pile.
i disagree, futureboy. i think that the depth of the mullions was carefully considered. i believe the facade is meant to appear "pixillated" in which case emphasizing the grid is important. the reason i believe he intended this sort of pixillation is that he chose multiple colors of glass beyond just the spandrel glass. multiple colored glass panes would not work with a just a sillicone sealant; they need to be made to look separated. (and isn't the ubiquity of the capless mullion just a trend anyway?)
just remember that the photographer for this project did a very good job and found the perfect time of day to have the mullions minimize. most times of the day (95%), the mullions are much more obtrusive, and especially so at night.
I am surprised how much discussion, a developer's luxury condo designed by a developers' architect written up by a developers' writer, can cause among the plebs.
The form could have challanced the curtain wall possibilities better, I see rather a block of building structure , it could be triangled, square or formed ,but it still will show the rigrid floors and stupid vertical and floor sections ,for me a piece of building structure, medium decored, as useal perfect in itself but not with the surroundings. Today such building structure are better combined, structured by other lattrice than the rigid cheap ,not lasting tradisional lattrice works.
Time is in for something that will last a thousand years instead of Max 30 years most modern lattrice works efford. Might find 3dh is also cheaper , think about it, conquer these new technikes and you can build anything, over time when methods are refined, things even get cheaper, the cheapest mountain of money. Curtain wall would be perfect vchallanced by methods, that just melt the curtain wall shape, into the structural framework, I think what ruin the design are the imprint vertical floors and the boring impac this alway's leave with you , of "modern" architecture, maybe the real reson architecture has to change.
futureboy, i was trying to say that you can't argue with the fact that it is poorly detailed. my wording was confusing.
it looks cheap up close (by up close i mean within a few blocks).
that said, i hear jafidler's 'pixel' argument. nevertheless, a bit more care could have resulted in a nicer project with less clumsy residual triangles of glass, mitered mullion connections etc.
765, the point i was trying to make is that theres a lot of criticism when i think it definitely adds something positive to the city. it was a developer project and could have been designed to be some crap historicist Trump-like building. most of the comments here have been negative, i think we should be happy that developers are starting to work with better architects, and the people (or at least those who can afford to live in these) are appreciating better design over run-of-the-mill.
could the detailing have been better? of course, but theres always a give and take. theres only so much time to do things and like others have mentioned the pace at what things are built here, especially with a developer, are fast-tracked.
i think tschumis addition to the city is understated and the massing is done nicely. its not overpowering, it fits into the context of the site, while still maximizing the building area to the developers delight. the form is elegant.
well, i guess my fear with gushing too much is that although this might all seem like a good idea during the goldrush (design=dollars), there is a greater and greater chance of a "market correction" happening. the problem being that so many architects are designing purely for image these days, there is a strong possibility that there will be a huge backlash against it in the near future, especially if the projects look like hell in a year (did somebody say eisenman).
for whatever reason people don't seem to mind as much when the trump building looks like hell in a year...but then again, expectations, expectations, expectations.
remember the first lesson of a commodity market, brand image is everything.
They call planter boxed, controlled entry, Plaza. (see the sales web site 'Blue')
I am wondering if the music could be changed to this to match people's curtains in the article?
Can one call it a blue sarcasm in black and white. pixellate, 80's are back. At least in terms of architectural spin...
No, I actually agree with you, beefeaters, it's pretty cool. But you've gotta admit, the 'oh, can you do better?' critique of criticism is pretty weak.
Someone should come up with a name for all these midrise condo projects that reach and tilt and cant outwards to maximize the zoning envelope. Neil Denari's residential building at the Highline also comes to mind:
This has got to say something ridiculous about the state of the NYC real estate bubble: all this extra structure is more than worth it, given what you can rent the extra floor plate for.
I know there are more examples, but I can't think of any others right now. And yes, before anyone mentions it, I know about Hugh Ferris:
snooker, you have such a visceral reaction to this building. what is it that bothers you so much about it?
i'm fond of it because the last time i was in new york last fall i remember seeing this building in construction and thinking that it really did do something interesting for the skyline. in general i find most tower architecture in new york incredibly bland, especially towers done in the last 30-40 years (really most everything post-bunshaft-era som). formally blue is a poor man's version of united architects proposal for the world trade center which is a good thing.
not everybody can live in a mies, this "poor man" would settle for a tschumi. if only mies had gotten the chance to deal with "air rights"
...and speaking of tschumi, anybody else remember the infamous "tschumi your tits" thread from the old archinect? that still cracks me up when i think about it.
jafidler....it looks like a first year students project.....all the time was spent working on the floor plans....the elevations don't do it for me.
I do not find anything interesting or pleasing. Coop...in there early years were chasing ideas and fracturing from the form...this guy is just doing a blob gone bad.
I like this photo a lot, but I just don't see how it's "playful". It feels very heavy, dark, and menacing to me. and ugly. but ugly can be good like the palais beaubourg. this isn't good.
Also, most of the floor plans are typical, but the 15th floor is very awkward. Love how they call the elevator lobby an "entrance gallery". And the expensive corner curtainwall is furred out and used for a closet.
I'll have to go back and take a second look at the detailing before I can comment.
futureboy-- nice running into you on the F train.. how would you improve the curtainwall detailing?
Sep 9, 07 6:53 pm ·
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NY Times review of Tschumi’s Blue
Anyone read this article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/arts/design/04blue.html?8dpc
thoughts?
thanks for posting this, i wondered how nicolai would find a way to talk nice about it.
i do agree about some of his massing comments. it does work in a nice way with the surrounding context, subtley subverting the traditional curtainwall box or neo-traditional blocks that developers erect....but.
and this is where his critique politely left off. but, this project suffers from the most horrid forms of poor detailing. the cheap curtainwall and awkward resolution of the exterior mullions and glass lend the overall playfulness of the project a horridly unresolved and hamfisted level of thoughtfulness that i'm sure the new tenants will learn to decry and later generations will sadly hang their heads and state the downfall of modern architecture to. the game of blue glass comes across as little more than a cheap parlor trick rather than a slick orchestration by a master magician. in the end it hides little more than a conventional curtainwall pattern would have. the shaping of the building, although potentially a beautiful billowing of the form to take maximum advantage of buildable area could have become an amenity to the apartments within, creating spectacular new views or interesting disjuncts between the skin and the structure. sadly again, the hamfisted execution provides little more than awkward angled surfaces and strangely inappropriate apartments that do not gain anything from the playfulness of the form. this project in an incredible expression, i feel, of the failures of the formalist school. by singly exploring form, without a viewed responsibility toward the built object, and without a sense of it's cost in relation to what is bought with its expense....it sells itself short and becomes another awkward developer project. i hope that some of the students that tschumi taught at columbia might learn some lessons from this project and understand that technical sophistication in computer modelling is not enough, but one must also take on the responsibility for gaining the technical sophistication within architecture's execution, or at least get a good consultant for it, in order to truly make these formal leaps into something more than just another architect's delusional ego statement.
It Sucks....I want a tower comission! This crap could have been built in the late 60's.....Take a look at the Boston Bank Building. What is wrong have people really fallen asleep?
i like it like i like atari video games. far better than sir norman's recent contribution to the skyline.
Hilarious N.O, hilarious...
It still sucks....what has the bank of boston offered the boston skyline....tis the same as this piece of garbage....sorry so many cad monkeys were burned out on this pile of dung.
Projects like that remind me why I probably won't be re-applying to either Columbia or Penn.
another shitty building by Tschumi...whats new?
considering it's a developer project, i give it an A
yeah - i kind of like it too. Sure it's chunky and clumsy, but it's also got a cheekyness to it. It's like an Alsop project. It's ok to have one around, just don't want a city full of them
Sorry , --- this is no saur complain about architects in general; there are some young ones who understand the new tools, the new way's to realise the structure . but realy there also are some old men , who kind in dispair and by some freaky order, are so close minded that all they can emagine, are to twist the forms into meaningless attitude, useless forms shouting their messeage that these architects fail to understand the structure as anything but surface and spetacular silli attitude.
As the old men reached an ompossible wall impossible to climb, as that would mean fantasy and visions ,instead they torture the forms into meaningless attitude and is totaly blind towerds the structure ; it's like the inspiration failed them so they kick the scale model and attemt a fake form language, where what they didn't realise is that architecture has to change, it can not stay as the trivial building core build as it alway's was build, just with a strange new form --- these manifest only the lack of visions and a fake form language ; there are nothing wrong with "a meaning" , and it is allright to shape and form different. But that ability don't come from the need of further meaningless torture of the forms, it come with the new possibilities in new technikes and new way's to put things together.
i agree with per!
but i wouldn't blame tschumi in this case. the developer-project aspect weighs heavy on this one. comparing this to tschumi's new project at the university of cincinnati - which is clever in its use of material to generate form, respond to its environs, and inform its fenestration - i almost wonder whether there's enough of tschumi in 'blue' to pass a dna test.
Sorry again, --- my critic was general, it wasn't tschumi's I was questioning, just a general trend.
this being a project for a developer does not necessarily release it from crticism in regards to detailing. if tschumi did allow the CM to detail the project, that is a serious oversight in his design strategy and should be held accountable for it as much as the building form itself.
as for SWs comment, i haven't seen the project at U of C, but his other new york project at columbia is very similarly poorly detailed. maybe he finally got lucky on the U of C project and had a CM to detail that project that actually knew what they were doing for once.
i suspect that the UC bldg had a local architect of record on board that saw it through CD's and CA. design focused offices (read: those that don't usually typically produce CDs for larger projects) seem to do best when paired up with a solid architect of record...please excuse my generalization.
otherwise, the bldg form is what it is, take it or leave it, but you can't argue that it looks like a poorly detailed cheap curtain wall upon close inspection. a friend of mine remarked this weekend as we walked past Blue that it looked like it was from a decade or two ago...
futureboy...
i think you'd also have to admit that the quality of construction
in new york city isn't always that great... requires a lot of CA
and such. the blue building was probably not ever going to be
all that well detailed to begin with given the constraints of the system
they had to use due to budgetary restrictions...but that also falls
on the architect as well.
i believe the building someone mentioned 'down the street' is the
building next door by narchitects...which is an interesting
juxtaposition.
i didn't know we had so many detail fetishists amongst us. by that measure, we should all love renzo piano and hate oma. outside of the detailing, i can't really gather why there is such a negative reaction to the building here. the form is sculputural, but is in no way anti-urban. i haven't seen the building up close, so i have no idea what the detailing is like, but i think the curtain wall on the whole is refreshing from the more standard curtain walls you see these days (read: boring corporate, som curtain wall). the building to me is idiosyncratic in a way all architecture should be, not polished to the point where all life is robbed from it. if this is so terrible, i wonder what you would consider a "good" tower?
In Manhattan these days, a "good" tower is an affordable one! :)
My review here:
http://djhuppatz.blogspot.com/2007/05/bernard-tschumi-and-death-of-avant.html
AP, i don't know what you mean that it doesn't look like a poorly detailed cheap curtian wall upon closer inspection. there are definitely far better examples than this, even in terms poor level developer work. the mullions are overly chunky, the form poorly resolved in relation to the curtianwall pattern...the overall pattern is clumsy, the depth of the mullion distracts from the subtle blue patterning that is "supposed" to mask the need for opaque panels at floors, columns, and vertical distribution. the squarish profile of the mullion caps used recalls typical suburban office park curtainwall.
just knowing a bit about curtainwall i feel this could have been much more successful with just a little research into what is possible within a standard kawneer or wausau system.
i mean, haven't these guys heard of suppressed mullions, profiled mullion caps, maybe even just looking at different proportions for the glass pattern that migth fit with the form better?
as for curtainwall, most of that is completed by guys that do nothing but curtainwall in new york...and actually they're going to be better than most in that department. i think you can expect a stronger execution from curtainwall than most other building systems here. plus, by its very nature it has to be very well coordinated by the manufacturer. so it doesn't require as much CA as you might think. at least not when it's the only exterior material. actually this project must have been pretty dumb and simple. same mullion profile all around, right glass sizes, okay got that detail for this odd angle corner......hmmm. let's check out that clip angle detail to the floor structure, looks good.
i'm sorry, maybe i expect too much....but then again, if this guy's so famous, shouldn't i have expectations?
and one other thing. i wouldn't consider myself necessarily a detail fetishist. i love work by oma that is intentionally raw and unresolved. i also love work by renzo piano, especially when it isn't overly fetishized. i just have a belief that concept is not enough (i've seen too much bad architecture excused by concept), and that one has to strive to adjust one's execution strategy to most closely approximate the project's conceptual goals. in this case i feel that the project itself (whether intentionally or unintentionally) suggested a more ambition goal than what was executed...and it's failure was in execution related to the development of detail. now this is a common theme in tschumi's work, and i have often excused it saying he's young, he's not done this before, he's not there yet, but i'm tired of excusing his inabilities as an architect. even though i still respect him as a designer and a theorist. it's sort of like the same feeling i have toward eisenman, if eisenman never builds another building but just draws them, the world will be a better place. maybe i need to see a good example from tschumi to keep me from lumping him into the aforementioned's pile.
i disagree, futureboy. i think that the depth of the mullions was carefully considered. i believe the facade is meant to appear "pixillated" in which case emphasizing the grid is important. the reason i believe he intended this sort of pixillation is that he chose multiple colors of glass beyond just the spandrel glass. multiple colored glass panes would not work with a just a sillicone sealant; they need to be made to look separated. (and isn't the ubiquity of the capless mullion just a trend anyway?)
just remember that the photographer for this project did a very good job and found the perfect time of day to have the mullions minimize. most times of the day (95%), the mullions are much more obtrusive, and especially so at night.
I am surprised how much discussion, a developer's luxury condo designed by a developers' architect written up by a developers' writer, can cause among the plebs.
The form could have challanced the curtain wall possibilities better, I see rather a block of building structure , it could be triangled, square or formed ,but it still will show the rigrid floors and stupid vertical and floor sections ,for me a piece of building structure, medium decored, as useal perfect in itself but not with the surroundings. Today such building structure are better combined, structured by other lattrice than the rigid cheap ,not lasting tradisional lattrice works.
Time is in for something that will last a thousand years instead of Max 30 years most modern lattrice works efford. Might find 3dh is also cheaper , think about it, conquer these new technikes and you can build anything, over time when methods are refined, things even get cheaper, the cheapest mountain of money. Curtain wall would be perfect vchallanced by methods, that just melt the curtain wall shape, into the structural framework, I think what ruin the design are the imprint vertical floors and the boring impac this alway's leave with you , of "modern" architecture, maybe the real reson architecture has to change.
game set match coedname.
futureboy, i was trying to say that you can't argue with the fact that it is poorly detailed. my wording was confusing.
it looks cheap up close (by up close i mean within a few blocks).
that said, i hear jafidler's 'pixel' argument. nevertheless, a bit more care could have resulted in a nicer project with less clumsy residual triangles of glass, mitered mullion connections etc.
on N.O.'s "love letter"
+
BLUE Update: Now With Sizzling Outdoor Shower!
so you guys have better projects? lets see em.
... because everyone knows that you can't decide whether something's good or not unless you yourself can do better ...
i think that building is pretty hot...does anybody know if it's sold out yet? anyone with a link to the marketing website, thanks
765, the point i was trying to make is that theres a lot of criticism when i think it definitely adds something positive to the city. it was a developer project and could have been designed to be some crap historicist Trump-like building. most of the comments here have been negative, i think we should be happy that developers are starting to work with better architects, and the people (or at least those who can afford to live in these) are appreciating better design over run-of-the-mill.
could the detailing have been better? of course, but theres always a give and take. theres only so much time to do things and like others have mentioned the pace at what things are built here, especially with a developer, are fast-tracked.
i think tschumis addition to the city is understated and the massing is done nicely. its not overpowering, it fits into the context of the site, while still maximizing the building area to the developers delight. the form is elegant.
i agree with puddles its pretty hot.
heres a link to the marketing site, cheesy music and all:
blue condos
well, i guess my fear with gushing too much is that although this might all seem like a good idea during the goldrush (design=dollars), there is a greater and greater chance of a "market correction" happening. the problem being that so many architects are designing purely for image these days, there is a strong possibility that there will be a huge backlash against it in the near future, especially if the projects look like hell in a year (did somebody say eisenman).
for whatever reason people don't seem to mind as much when the trump building looks like hell in a year...but then again, expectations, expectations, expectations.
remember the first lesson of a commodity market, brand image is everything.
They call planter boxed, controlled entry, Plaza. (see the sales web site 'Blue')
I am wondering if the music could be changed to this to match people's curtains in the article?
Can one call it a blue sarcasm in black and white. pixellate, 80's are back. At least in terms of architectural spin...
Believe me this design is "past design" really past.... and I'm pretty open to anything...even living in a horse barn, which I have done.
No, I actually agree with you, beefeaters, it's pretty cool. But you've gotta admit, the 'oh, can you do better?' critique of criticism is pretty weak.
Someone should come up with a name for all these midrise condo projects that reach and tilt and cant outwards to maximize the zoning envelope. Neil Denari's residential building at the Highline also comes to mind:
This has got to say something ridiculous about the state of the NYC real estate bubble: all this extra structure is more than worth it, given what you can rent the extra floor plate for.
I know there are more examples, but I can't think of any others right now. And yes, before anyone mentions it, I know about Hugh Ferris:
snooker, you have such a visceral reaction to this building. what is it that bothers you so much about it?
i'm fond of it because the last time i was in new york last fall i remember seeing this building in construction and thinking that it really did do something interesting for the skyline. in general i find most tower architecture in new york incredibly bland, especially towers done in the last 30-40 years (really most everything post-bunshaft-era som). formally blue is a poor man's version of united architects proposal for the world trade center which is a good thing.
not everybody can live in a mies, this "poor man" would settle for a tschumi. if only mies had gotten the chance to deal with "air rights"
...and speaking of tschumi, anybody else remember the infamous "tschumi your tits" thread from the old archinect? that still cracks me up when i think about it.
mies did pretty well with the setback ordinance.
jafidler....it looks like a first year students project.....all the time was spent working on the floor plans....the elevations don't do it for me.
I do not find anything interesting or pleasing. Coop...in there early years were chasing ideas and fracturing from the form...this guy is just doing a blob gone bad.
that's pretty damn boring. I'll give it a C.
The blue glass is everywhere now. I have seen 3 projects recently with this exact same thing.
while coop may have had brilliant conceptual underpinnings, the work i thought was always ugly. blue seems lite on ideas, but i don't find it ugly.
i'll stop defending this thing now.
I like this photo a lot, but I just don't see how it's "playful". It feels very heavy, dark, and menacing to me. and ugly. but ugly can be good like the palais beaubourg. this isn't good.
Also, most of the floor plans are typical, but the 15th floor is very awkward. Love how they call the elevator lobby an "entrance gallery". And the expensive corner curtainwall is furred out and used for a closet.
I'll have to go back and take a second look at the detailing before I can comment.
futureboy-- nice running into you on the F train.. how would you improve the curtainwall detailing?
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