Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
For me, that would be the Pan Am building, although I can't underscore how much of an impression PVM would have made to Canadians in 1962.
I don't think people think about it much today, but Gordon Bunshaft's One Chase Manhattan Plaza, which topped out in 1959, and was the first tower in Lower Manhattan to rub shoulders with pre-Depression era giants like 70 Pine and 40 Wall. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finally caught up to what it had been before Black Tuesday in 1954 and, not long after, planning for towers like this began. |
I didn't know that one was so early, although thinking back, I have seen photos where it the only box amidst the old Downtown spires.
And PVM was '62... it must have been thrilling. As much as we bemoan the urban planning debacles of the modernists, these early displays of architectural power must have really resonated.
Although I would do a
lot of things to have a day exploring prewar Montreal and everything that was lost, when I put myself in their shoes, PVM would have made the whole spot seem grim, cramped, corrupted and parochial.
Even its concrete base, hovering above the city on a shimmer of glass doors, would have seemed almost impossibly vast, austere and elegant, with a scale that paid as little heed to the jumbled city around it as an Egyptian temple.
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