Quote:
Originally Posted by Ned.B
I don't think they were trying to make the building look half as tall as it actually is, nor will their design really achieve what you are saying. If we believe the rendering, the alternating spandrel panels will only be slightly darker than the main building color, so it's not the same as if they had used glass spandrels. I argue that it gives necessary relief to the building by helping accentuate the verticality and tie some of the facade elements together to avoid a simple grid of punched rectangles.
If anything is problematic on this building, it's the bottom two floors, which do read as too tall and out of touch with the human scale.
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I can respect that, but I look at the elevation of the chamfer or the elevations two bays (or, rather, four bays) out from it, and it virtually reads as "four stories" (or, more specifically, four segments--I know as an observer that they aren't floors) even though it is eight (despite the difference in shading for every other spandrel being slight, but the difference does its intended job of pushing the perception in a certain direction through suggestion). The piers are also thicker for every pair of windows on those elevations, and for those areas, I still see six sets of squares surmounting the double-height street-level area, rather than 24 discrete windows. Also, the way that the facades of the wings are treated exacerbates this phenomenon: For the elevations at the northern and western-most portions of the building, they changed the design of the facade every two stories, so the mind perceives the building ascending in four segments. The overall rhythm, then, is composed of too-large elements.
Similar to the Loyola law building downtown but not as severe:
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