Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human experience. Are we building a world where there is no “there” there? How will we know what we have lost?
Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. We will also consider together how these elements of place can be treated responsibly by architects, planners, designers, and others who shape the spaces where we spend our lives.
Click here to see an index of all of the pieces in the “Elements of Place” series. The discussions will also inform a Lab on the future of community development in May 2012.
Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So we’ve talked about places created by lines like borders. But I feel like I still don’t understand the way an architect uses lines to create the place of a building. What are the basic things any architect knows about how to use lines?
Mike Davis: Architects use different weights of line in drawing. For example there are thinner, lighter lines for certain less significant parts of a plan, then heavier lines to outline things. There are the various other ways in which we can use lines to signify things: double lines, broken lines, jagged lines, that sort of thing. You always have to put the lines down before you can move on to the more complex shading and shadowing.
ABN: We talked a little bit about places with “good lines” last time – how do you identify that quality in a building? How do you put it there?
MD: It means that the building has elements of symmetry, order, beauty or balance. It’s the proportions of it, the way it meets the ground and goes up into the air.
The way lines are at the ground is different from the way they are up in the air. They don’t need to look like they’ve erupted from the ground to be nice. There are some nice buildings that achieve a sense of floating over the ground, with a heavy color or material sitting over something transparent. That speaks to how the building meets the ground, or doesn’t meet the ground, in this case.
A lot of classical architecture – the Pyramids and Greco-Roman architecture, probably the architecture of the East too – had a lot of symmetry to it. There is a center, and you walk into the middle of the building or space. I think when done well, though, asymmetry seems more interesting. It invites a more interesting conversation.
We went through a bit of a fashion period in the U.S. of postmodern architecture that imitated some of that classical architecture. Today some of it looks elegant, while some of it looks like a cartoon.
Asymmetry, when done poorly, can looks hideous. Symmetry, when done poorly, is only boring. That can even extend to things like the placement of an outlet or an air conditioning unit. When you see something that is not quite in the center of a wall, but looks like it’s supposed to be, it’s poor.
ABN: Sure – if the spire of a cathedral is slightly off-center, you can reasonably ask what the builder’s intention might have been. But an off-center air-conditioning vent is just sloppy.
MD: It shows a lack of thought or follow through. The opposite is something like the asymmetry in Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright home that is considered one of the best pieces of American architecture. It uses a series of very striking linear forms that are also asymmetrical. But there is still an order, elegance, and balance to it all that really works.
It works in a really different way from a building like the Pantheon, which is not only symmetrical but omnidirectional. That’s not just an elegant piece of architecture, but a marvel of engineering – it would be challenging and rather expensive to build even with everything we know today.
Now, in residential architecture, especially in a lot of tract housing, you actually find a real lack of order. There’s no sense of what is supposed to be inviting or where you’re supposed to be. You know where you’re supposed to enter because it’s got that little gable form that says, “Hi, I’m a front door.” It’s a bastardized, betwixt-in between version of asymmetry without that sense of order. That actually is an instance where asymmetry is just weak. Beneath the skin job that conforms to the design trend du jour – “Tuscan,” “Colonial,” “Cape Cod,” or whatever – is often what I would consider a poorly formed building. There are none of the things that actually make buildings beautiful or challenging.
ABN: So what are some buildings that get line right? Last time you mentioned the John Hancock in Chicago.
MD: Right. Even though it’s getting a little long in the tooth, it is still an absolutely iconic building. And it’s basically five lines. It isn’t the most ornate thing in the world. It isn’t a painted Easter egg. It’s simple, bold and strong. Its very enduring.
ABN: That raises the question of another type of line, the skyline.
MD: Well, compare Chicago and San Francisco. You could compare and contrast the place of the John Hancock in Chicago to the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. That building has its foil in the Bank of America building. In Chicago, it’s the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) - which for about 35 years was the tallest building in the world. I don’t find the Sears Tower in itself to be all that stimulating but again, like the Hancock Building, it is not to be missed and it is a powerful, visual icon.
It seems to me that to look at the Chicago skyline isn’t to take in numerous individual instances of “regal” architecture in their own right, but a cohesive, lyrical “whole.” It’s somehow the combination of all of them in that skyline. It has verticality on one end and the horizontality of a place like Navy Pier or McCormick Place, the giant convention center that juts out at the other.
The new Trump building is an elegant addition to the skyline. Again, its silvery blue cylindrical forms are not revolutionary or utterly unique, but it reflects the sunlight beautifully. Like the white Aon Building (which was once Standard Oil) it has added to the skyline in a positive way, juxtaposed to the two famous black buildings on either end. It’s not a revolutionary skin or revolutionary form, but it has nice proportions.
New York has something of a different nature. The Empire State Building was for about 40 years the tallest building in the world. But it has a totally different sense of proportion to it than the Chrysler Building. It’s like a guy who has done a lot of weight training but hasn’t cut the body fat off. It’s big, it’s bulky, though it has a kind of nostalgic quality to it now. The Chrysler Building, on the other hand – it’s slender, it’s not as tall. The crown on top of it is so elegantly done.
The Hancock Building is not as ornate or as elegant as the Chrysler Building, largely due to the differing architectural vocabularies of their day, but with their illuminated “crowns,” they are both iconic symbols of their respective cities. The postcard views of the Chicago skyline are those focused on the Hancock building. That seems to “define” Chicago.
There were also the World Trade Center buildings, which most architects regarded as unremarkable as best. They were essentially tall rectilinear boxes similar to the Aon Tower in Chicago – vertical, virtually nondescript. But the fact that there were two of them somehow made the “whole” more interesting than if there were just one of them. I felt like the skyline was better for it, though I don’t know if many of my colleagues would agree with me.
Those are the cities with distinctive shapes that come to mind. LA’s skyline seems like a finished composition – you have a tall building in the center of the other tall buildings. Boston doesn’t have much of a distinctive skyline. San Diego doesn’t. Dallas clowns around with shapes a little bit. Houston’s is interesting; again, in some ways made moreso by the tension created by the two tallest buildings, Allied Bank Plaza and Texas Commerce Center, somewhat “opposing” each other on the skyline. It’s a bit of the interest you get with a suspension bridge such as the Golden Gate Bridge or Brooklyn Bridge.
ABN: You are an architect who has been in the position of changing a city skyline, in this case Phoenix’s. What does that mean to you?
MD: I’ve gravitated to buildings that are not just vertical, but buildings with iconic form, buildings with curved faces even though they may still be basically rectilinear. There is a building in Chicago at 333 Wacker Drive designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox that put them on the map. It’s a 36-story office building with really elegant green glass, black and gray granite – but it was curved. One side has a sort of parallelogram shape, and then the other side just has a graceful arc.
We’ve done about half a dozen buildings with curved facades in Phoenix, but you have to give a tip of the hat to KPF – they were the ones who really broke us out of the world of the Dilbert cube or the office spaces of the movie “Brazil.” In fact, it’s true that you are going to have a little less effectiveness if you are going to apply a grid space plan to a curved form. But there’s an elegance in that building, the way it turns the corner on Wacker Drive, the way it greets the Chicago River. It’s almost thirty years old now, but it still looks good. Good lines.
I also think of the AT&T Building in New York that was designed by Philip Johnson, which has what they sometimes call a “Chippendale Top.” This was a building also done in the postmodern era not long after that building on Wacker Drive. A lot of the idea behind the postmodern movement was to bring some scale and humanness back to buildings. But it feels very much like a period piece now. I think we’ve gone back to the idea of a plainer, simpler form.
Clearly you could change the skyline of a city like Phoenix by adding a 100-story building. Interestingly enough, that height is almost the exact same height as two of our iconic mountains, Camelback Mountain and Piestewa Peak – which presents some intriguing philosophical arguments in itself. But what’s actually happened here is a result of the insanity of rather preposterous, capricious legislative height regulations. All of a sudden you have a ton of buildings that are all exactly the same height. It’s horrible. You don’t have anything in Nature that looks like that, sans the Salt Flats or Kansas! You have an aircraft carrier. I prefer the aircraft carrier, frankly.
There are other ways to alter a skyline, though. One thing that strikes me about Phoenix is how much brown there is. You don’t encounter, say, a refreshing azure blue such as our design for the W Hotel and Condos that would have been built adjacent to the Phoenix Suns arena. Overall, I would say shape and color seem like the main things you can control to change a skyline.
But Phoenix still cries for an icon. Most of the buildings are roughly the same height. None of the taller ones are architecturally brilliant and none of them are architecturally abysmal. Most of them are mediocre with few exceptions. There are plenty of mediocre buildings in Chicago too, but there are a few fine compositions that stand out in the midst of that. The background buildings frame the signature pieces. Phoenix, on the other hand, feels like a bunch of background buildings without any “stars.”
I don’t know that it really needs to be like any of these other places, though.
There’s one more building from New York that I should mention. It is a building that was done for Citi Group just south of Central Park. It is about 75 stories tall, black glass and silver colored spandrel panels, and top just has a 45-degree angle. It is a feature piece on the Manhattan skyline, and has been since the late 70s or early 80s.
That’s the thing with lines – you don’t have to make a huge change for something to be interesting. It doesn’t have to be garish. It doesn’t have to be screaming. It doesn’t have to be on fire. You can make a slight change in an angle that makes it really nice.
ABN: Are there any lines that offend you?
MD: There is a building here in Phoenix that was done for Dial, the soap company, around 1985. It also has a sort of hexagonal shape in plan. It probably looked good in the drawing, but the constructed building now actually looks something like a cockroach stuck in the ground. It’s also been compared to a feminine deodorant stick. It has a red graded skin, copper glass windows – nothing wrong with the materials. They’re appropriate to Arizona. But the proportions of it are ghastly.
There’s also the Smurfit-Stone Building in Chicago, which sits off the corner of Millennium Park. You’ll see it frequently in movies – it has a kind of diamond-shaped chopped top. Compared to the building with the 45-degree angle that I talked about in New York, I find this one to be inelegant because of its proportions. The office spaces are pretty neat, with the glass ceilings coming back over your head at a 45-degree angle – that’s why they use it in movies. But from outside it looks pretty squat. It feels distended. On a 80- to 100- story building, it might look all right. That building in Phoenix, if it had been 60 stories, might have looked all right.
I am also unsure about some of these larger buildings that are being contemplated throughout the world. There is one in India that is just hideous, maybe the worst building I’ve ever seen. It’s supposed to be a 2,000-foot tall step-pyramidal sort of thing. There are also buildings in China where they have taken the model of Western architecture for the first 80 stories and then put the form of a pagoda on top. To me, that’s Frankensteinian. There is absolutely beautiful Eastern architecture, but imposed on a box of steel and glass? I don’t think so.
ABN: If it’s true that the skyscrapers of these new cities are going to be Frankensteinian, as you say, that’s really discouraging, because that would mean that in the end that’s what the cities experienced by most of humankind would look like.
MD: But think of the world’s current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It was designed by Adrian Smith, the same guy who designed the new Trump building on the river in Chicago. The skins on the buildings are actually quite similar. That building has a kind of elegance that grows out of a sort of triangulated place. It’s sort of like watching a jet fighter go into a vertical climb. It’s reminiscent of some of the most beautiful forms in Monument Valley and places in the U.S., or stalagmites growing in a cave with millions of years of mineral drip. It certainly looks like a 21st-century building, but it references natural forms very nicely.
It’s hard to say where these things go wrong. It’s not as if you can say, “You broke Skyline Rules 27 and 44.” I think the thing that really offends is when the proportions are grotesque, when there is a weightiness that seems oppressive from the ground.
ABN: So ultimately you’re talking about the balance of the vertical and the horizontal in the formation of a place. Well, that’s a whole other topic.
Previous Elements of Place discussion: “See place between the lines” • Next Elements of Place discussion: “Control the vertical and the horizontal”
Images: Selection from “Diagram of the Principal High Buildings of the Old World,” 1884 poster by George F. Cram (teaser from home page); Chicago skyline image courtesy Wikimedia Commons (top); Dubai skyline image courtesy Wikimedia Commons (bottom).
