[scalziand]

Originally Posted by wrabbit

^That'd probably be the client's call - Standard Oil, I believe? Although Stone did like his white marble.

Ayn Rand & Howard Roark aside, the client selects the site & dictates the parameters of the program. But I'm sure that you know this already.

I was just reading an anecdote from one of the architects involved with Water Tower Place - the white-marble-clad tower adjacent to Hancock on Michigan Ave in Chicago - on how he'd pleaded with the client to go black on the tower, but that the client insisted on white marble. What can you do? Some architects are better salesmen than others, I guess.

Although with Stone, the white marble was already sort of his professional signature, like Gehry & titanium.

I was unsure of how much leeway Stone had in designing the building.

It's ironic the way Mies himself dealt with the insulation problem in the Lakeshore Drive Apartments. Here's Daniel Libeskind on them:

But to me they are the ultimate irony. When they were built from 1948 to 1951, there were to be the embodiment, the visual articulation, of the modernist ideology. That was what we were to see in the clearly expressed steel skeletons and the black-painted steel sheets covering the columns and beams. But Mies knew this steel couldn't be fireproofed and thus had to be encased in concrete. And then he covered the concrete and steel-just for show. So much for the idea that form follows function.

Oh, and I rather enjoyed The Fountainhead when I read it.