Quote:
Originally Posted by cozy
A question for the engineers, no doubt.
Too bad you don't like it, hopefully you don't live in Chicago because we are keeping it 
Keep in mind our river boat tour from shoreline was the most popular tour in the world on tripadvisor in 2017. chicagoans love that river.. this building absolutely has a front and a back. i don't care what people have to stare at while they wait in traffic on LSD, or what the affluent residents of LSE have to gaze upon. however i am kind of upset that the planetarium view will include the black strips of mechanics |
It isn't a question for the engineers. It is a design problem. If there was an oversight or if new requirements come from engineering, design should work to find a solution with some coherence.
At its absolute simplest, the black color works against the way the color gradation of the curtain wall is used to reinforce the frustum shape. Light colors on the peaks with dark in the valleys is a clever way to create more contrast. Throwing a full black stripe across both peaks and valleys flattens out the form. Stretching that across the the whole floor also flattens the transition points laterally. It is a hard problem they took on trying keep the geometry readable on a building of such scale. The glass color and the slight N/S offset of each stack is all in service of that objective. The louvres aren’t.
I don't even know what you are trying to get at with your riverboat rambling. The point is that a more considered design doesn't need such a visual cop out. Look at how trump tower handles it, the transitions between segments actually contribute positively to the design. That looks intentful, this looks like a bandaid.