They haven't even broken ground on the Chicago Spire and already a parody of it may be on the way. The Florence, Italy-based architect and developer David Fisher recently announced plans to build a skyscraper at a not yet determined site in Chicago. Fisher describes the skyscraper as "One building — endless shapes." Each of the building's 60 to 90 floors would revolve independently around a central core, creating a constantly shifting profile for tourists snapping photographs on the architectural boat tours. Fisher also wants to build a similar structure in Dubai.
Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin is very upset. He says giving the Italian architect free reign on the Chicago skyline "would be akin to turning over the hallowed walls of the Art Institute to a high school art class." Kamin sees Fisher's "great merry-go-round in the sky" as an example of "extreme architecture," which he defines as
extreme expression, the ceaseless quest for aesthetic novelty powered by new technologies that help generate new forms, which are always interesting but not so often good. The media, ever hungry for the latest "wow," is an accessory to the crime. In many cases, one wonders if the designs were meant for magazine covers, newspaper front pages or Web sites rather than real life.
We all know of buildings that look cool but are a pain in the ass to find your way around. But spectacular visuals and disorienting sense of space are endemic to contemporary urban space, as commentators like Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau have noted. As Le Corbusier once said, all modern architecture was designed to be photographed, and web sites are how ideas in architecture are propagated these days.
Fisher's stack of pennies building may be okay for Dubai--from which the word dubious comes from--but it isn't right for Chicago, Kamin says. "Chicago is different, a tough-guy town where the stark rectangles of the street grid extend upward to the skyline and such boxy behemoths as Sears Tower." I agree that Dubai sets a bad example in pretty much everything, so the less we look like it the better. However I disagree that Chicago is still a "tough guy town," an image that combines the city's mobster past and its now vanished manufacturing base. The only thing the city manufacturers these days is pizza. There are still neighborhood bars in the city where cops and postal workers can be found drinking at 9 o'clock in the morning, but those places are fast disappearing. Vast swaths of the city are being gentrified. The definitive Chicago abode is no longer the bungalow. Now it's the three-level condo housing an options trader, a ex-frat boy, and a Lincoln Park Trixie. Slats Grobnik doesn't live here anymore, but if he did, his place would have granite countertops and a built-in microwave.
I'd rather have failed experiments than safe boxes any day, but we still need to be judicious. I'd never buy a unit in Fisher's whirligig building, and I agree with Kamin that if we have to have such a thing, please don't build it near the IBM Building, which is already being defaced by that blue Shrek of a building, the Trump Tower. Maybe Schaumburg will take it. Schaumburg will build anything.
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