Quote:
Originally Posted by Don098
This building makes me want to barf.
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My reaction isn't quite that strong. I'm not a fan of the tenuous needle/stalagmite family of designs pioneered by Wright's Illinois (with the notable exception of the Chicago Spire, whose loss was an epic tragedy). The most recently-posted renderings of Jeddah Tower above show a building that is aesthetically and psychologically worthless - it doesn't inspire, attract, provoke, or in any other way engage the senses, the passions, or thoughts, and yet lacks even the virtues of simplicity.
It is an abstraction that fails to grab the cerebral imagination; a massive structure that fails to impress the macho impulse (it comes off as defensive rather than assertive); smooth without any trace of elegance or compelling flow; and compensates the lack of intrinsic grandeur with a single-minded drive for height at the expense of all other considerations. The sheer philistine pettiness of it is disturbing, because they could build something a bit shorter that looks awesome and still utterly dwarfs the Burj. If it's built as the most recently posted renderings indicate, it will be contemptible as anything other than an engineering laboratory.
Nonetheless, I can't deny it will be a highly challenging and instructive exercise for the people who design and build it, and through them the entire skyscraper community. So as this project proceeds, I'll try to look at it not as architecture, but rather as a bold technological experiment - and I think we'd all be much more satisfied looking at it through that lens.