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Old Posted Jul 17, 2014, 2:44 PM
LouisVanDerWright LouisVanDerWright is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pilsenarch View Post
Well, LVDW, I attended the GSD with Gang and have worked with her, and if there was any substance to what you are saying in her mind or in this project at this date, I would give you more credit for attempting to give this project conceptual rigor. But the themes you mention, positive and negative space, etc., have had no conscious part of the development (or lack thereof) in this project.

I know that the beauty you see in this work is subjective and you, and many others, love it and read a lot into it, but architecturally, what you speak of, "there is no there, there".

Architecture, as I am sure you know, is not just sculpture, it is function and context. Creating a 'negative space' that is an awkward few feet between two adjacent highrises in downtown Chicago isn't art, it's just bad design and bad urbanism.
That's kinda the point, I don't think that designs need to be "justified" any more. I don't even care whether it was conscious choice by Gang to make the setbacks relate to neighboring buildings. The fact is the design DOES relate quite well to the surrounding buildings save for the fact that the GEMs school does not directly butt up against the building (which I am not entirely convinced is even an issue). If Gang really did just arbitrarily create this design, then it lends way more credence to the idea that this building should be viewed as sculpture. It doesn't look the way it does because of some function, it just looks like it does because she thought it looked cool. Isn't that essentially what sculpture is? Pure aesthetics?

Like I said in my last post: "Whether or not it is intentional is a different story". I don't care whether Gang's reasoning was the same as my critique above because, from aesthetic standpoint, I think it works whether the design comes from theory or just pure "ooo that will look pretty".

Quote:
BTW, your suggestion that the frustum transitions were meant to relate to it's neighbors' roof would seem to contradict your thesis that the building was designed as a "separate building" and a stand alone sculpture.
Is it not possible for a building to be a stand alone building yet still relate to it's surroundings to aesthetic reasons? But I never said that this building was "designed as a separate building", I said it IS a separate building. In other words, what else do you expect? This building to be psychically connected to every building around it? Gang didn't design every building in LSE so of course there will be gaps between this and the buildings around it because they are separate buildings with separate functions. Not having a gap between this and GEMs is not even an option so I don't see why you even bring that gap up. Now if there were a gap at street level, that'd be different, but there isn't, this is just how we build highrises in the modern era. No more party walls above the base.
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