What do you guys think of this?

This is the twin 23 story Agricultural Bank of China in Guangzhou. I only saw it from a distance of about 1/4 mile (due to mass construction all the way around it), but it looks like a really nice set of Romanesque twin towers. Certainly alot nicer than say...Proctor&Gamble in Cincinnati...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...u/CHINA225.jpg

This set of apartment towers not far from there wasn't great (Park Avenue-ish), but it wasn't a total destruction of the style either...(in 10 years they could look disastrous though...depending on the quality of the cladding)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...u/CHINA240.jpg

The first one is well executed. The second looks like the Ansonia meets Miami.

I'd call that more pseudoVictorian than classical. There's a senior lifecare building in San Francisco that's somewhat like it--all gables and mansard roofs and such--but I don't know where I'd find a picture.

Wow... talk about out of scale. It'll also be interesting to see what that nice white facade looks like after a decade of exposure to Guangzhou smog.

Probably a lot like this:

http://www.nycjpg.com/2003/pictures/jpg/0802.p.jpg

very nice

My fellow Nashvillians, be proud. We have some lovely structures. :cheers:

By the way, those Dresden buildings are absolutely wonderful.

SSP architectural ideaology wars... how dorky

The Agricultural Bank of China building is interesting. Why? Because the Chinese as a culture have their own, historic traditional architecture which is uniquely Chinese.

That would be akin to us putting a Forbidden City-style roof on a skyscraper. (which, btw, is being done in Chicago ATM) If this seems preposterous to us, why is it any less ridiculous to borrow styles from ancient Rome/Greece?

I'm a huge fan of traditional architecture, but at some level we do need to have a digression away from it. Not a total rejection (in many cases WELL-DONE traditional styles are warranted and desired) but a trial-and-error to try to build on what we know and push it further, making it work with modern functions and materials and be beautiful as well.

well said. A lot of the Beaux Arts-trained architects like Paul Cret and Raymond Hood were able to take what they learned about scale, massing, and proportion from classical architecture, and strip it of most of its ornament and pretensions, producing masterpieces like Rockafeller Center or the Folger Library in DC. Personally I think this is why so many people are drawn to Art Deco- it took the best lessons from the past and married them to modern building technology, and didn't sacrifice visual delight and color in the name of functionalism. Even Adolf Loos, who gave us the phrase "ornament is crime" and compared gingerbread details to prison tattoos, made up for it by filling the interiors of his buildings with sumptuous materials like leather, exotic wood and stone.

Greek and Roman buildings are not about gingerbread, they're about a sytem of mathematics and proportions derived from nature. The final facade of Grand Central wasn't settled on until years into construction, but the whole buiding was designed functionally around pedestrian flow so that someone walking to their train 2 levels under 42nd street never encounters a single stair. 30th Street Station separates commuter rail, intercity rail, and originally had a bus terminal, and has them all arranged in a coherent, functional layout that's apparent as soon as you walk into the magnificent main concourse. A lot of the "new" ideas claimed by modernism are just old ideas, decontextualized and repackaged with jargon. You were the first ones to think of big windows that bring in a lot of light? Really? That's the exact reason I would never move into a postwar building- prewar buildings gave much more focus to sunlight and venhilation, since they didn't have modern climate control and artificial light. How is that not funtional? Bris-soleil over the curtain wall to regulate temperature? We call them awnings.

When architecture schools moved their focus away from working with well-established strictures of proportion, form, and scale, and started stressing innovation uber alles and telling students that the past had nothing to offer them, all architecture suffered. Architects aren't capable of designing a good neoclassical building because their teachers probably wouldn't know how either. The best architects working today, like Calatrava, design buildings whose form grows out of their structural system- just like a Greek temple or a Gothic Cathedral- not something that just slaps the most trendy pastiche over a conventional structural frame.

what's you guys opinion on this particular building: the peachtree, in northern midtown atlanta? it was built in 1989, but it fooled me until i'd seen it on emporis. i think it has better proportions than that courthouse in new york, but still misses the mark in some ways when you get up close - noting the brick veneer especially. (or what looks to be that)

http://www.emporis.com/files/transfe.../01/177984.jpg

more photos here as to not clog up this thread.

The materials and mish-mosh of styles give it away.

Colonial Williamsburg on steroids.

Colonial Williamsburg on shit, I'd say.

a bit more than 50 years

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~hlarsen...0Monument5.jpg

Bass Performance Hall - Fort Worth, Texas (1998)
http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/2...asshallwx3.jpg

Fort Worth Central Library - Fort Worth, Texas (1992)
http://img477.imageshack.us/img477/1...libraryit2.jpg
http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/6814/18931677ow6.jpg

I'll try to post more on Saturday.

Southlake Town Hall - Southlake, TX (1999)
http://img65.imageshack.us/img65/599...0gazeboaq5.jpg
http://img391.imageshack.us/img391/203/60083133cg2.jpghttp://img66.imageshack.us/img66/9927/42638150jc2.jpg

Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business Management - Houston, Texas (2002)
http://img480.imageshack.us/img480/3...834dd8blf9.jpg
http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/6...ccfda1omb2.jpg
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1...8d65ccojc7.jpg

Texas has been putting up some incredible structures lately.

Yeah; I'd say it's largely because Texan cities desire the same kinds of grandiose public buildings that older Northern cities have. I particularly like the Southlake building.

On a side note - although many universities turned to modernism around the 1950s, quite a few of them remained loyal to the original style of their campuses. Notre Dame, for example, after a quick experiment with modernism that produced the monolithic library, along with Touchdown Jesus, returned to the variant of Gothic architecture that dominated the original campus. Apparently, from the above pictures, Rice University has a similar story.

Jordan Science Center, 2006

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/8...sciencemz6.jpg

Kinda cool is the fact that they built a special pavilion in the back for a 3d-visualization theater... an unusual feature for a Gothic building.

The Dresden buildings were destroyed in a merciless holocaust of bombs at the very end of WWII. The entire city was destroyed along with a 100,000 civilians and allied POWs.
I visited this very street in 1994 and there was nothing there but grass lots. The German people have raised and spent millions of dollars rebuilding the famous cathedral that you see here. Every detail inside is exact except for the organ. Surprisingly Queen Elizabeth donated some money. Churchill had said that he wanted to bring terror to the German people.

I expect that very few people are still alive who remember walking down this street before the inferno. It must be a strange sight indeed to see buildings which have not existed since 1945.

On a Berlin thread there is talk of rebuilding the cities "Schloss" or royal palace which was destroyed by the Soviets and the war.

I think that its a terrific idea to build new buildings in painstaking historical detail. Rebuilding the lost classical buildings of Europe could create a whole industry which would last decades.