At the 1929 Beaux Arts Ball, William van Allen, the designer of the Chrysler Building, masqueraded as his landmark skyscraper, which was then being built. Van Allen's elaborate costume, complete with his signature spire headdress, underscores the theatrical dimension of the skyscraper and the role it has played in the theater of the urban skyline. The Chrysler building and the Empire State building were some of the first protagonists in the unfolding drama of the city. These early skyscrapers dressed structural steel frames in elaborate cladding, transforming the mundane into the spectacular. These five skyscrapers we are about to see are very good examples of how the mundane was turned into the spectacular.
DG Bank (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Frankfurt, 1993)
The 658 foot (201 meter) DG Bank Headquarters is one of the first American-style skyscrapers to be built in a European city, where building regulations had traditionally limited building heights. The design of the DG Bank allows this American import to integrate itself into the city fabric by breaking the tower into a composition of discrete parts.
Composed of distinct masses, the design introduces a new “tower of three parts.” Each of its parts-podium, shaft, and crown-is molded by external site forces and internal programmatic needs. In this case, the design brief called for a mix of uses, including office space, residential apartments, and a central winter garden. The design of the tower includes a slender shaft with a low rise podium that wraps around the winter garden. The low rise structure embraces the winter garden and defines the perimeter of the block. The tower takes on a figural quality in the shaft, and creates a signature profile against the sky, where a radial, cantilevered crown gestures towards the old center of Frankfurt.
This marriage of curvilinear and rectilinear volumes places the tower in dialogue with its external context, while its internal spatial requirement for natural light informs the tower's slender proportions. The materials used to clad the tower reinforce each separate element. The shaft of the tower is made up of a curved volume, clad in white metal and glass, while the orthogonal volume is clad in stone, with punched openings. The central volume, an exterior expression of the service core, is clad in stone and acts as an organizing spine. The low-rise perimeter blocks are clad primarily in stone with punched-out windows to help ground the tower.
Stylistically, the DG Bank tower is a pivotal building, marking the climax of a collagist design strategy of assembly of discrete building parts, and signaling a shift away from classically inspired postmodernism, towards a language that could be called “theatrical modernism.” The design of the tower harkens to a romantic age of skyscraper design, when each building was a theatrical actor in an elaborate urban masquerade. The DG Bank tower's architectural articulations and formal gestures place the building in dialogue with its audience-the city.
Plaza 66 (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Shanghai, 2001)
Located along Nanjing Xi Lu, Shanghai's historical commercial street, the new mixed use development draws on the vibrant street life to inform the vocabulary of building elements. Its voluptuous composition of curvilinear forms makes it approach the baroque.
The development is comprised of two office towers and a five story retail podium that houses a luxury shopping mall. The design is based on a language of concave and convex geometry that shapes each of the major elements. The mall is organized around a curved retail gallery, which connects an almond-shaped atrium to an inverted-cone-shaped volume. The towers are arranged radially around an implied center, and share a curved mid height bridge. Each volume is articulated as distinct and recognizable, composed sculpturally as a three dimensional collage. The architects describe the dynamic composition as an “Embrace of swirling forms…influenced by the forces of a vortex.”
Each element in the composition is clad in a distinct curtain-wall fabric. The retail podium is clad in stone, while the shafts of the two towers are clad in a vertically articulated glass curtain wall. The upward spiral of the composition is terminated by a translucent glass lantern. The need to surmount a tower with a dramatic crown, spire, or headpiece is typical of theatrical Asian skyscrapers, and is a reference to early Art Deco skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.
The project is typical of a crop of buildings that sprang up in Shanghai in the late 1990;s. Fueled by optimism, foreign investment, and departure from traditionally strict speculative office space criteria, these projects embraced a formal exuberance unseen anywhere else in the world. The cumulative effect of these developments have transformed the city, and reestablished an image of Shanghai as the cultural and business center of a new China.
I was looking everywhere for the referencing of IFC to the Art Deco style, and finally found it wonderfully detailed in your article.
Thank you again :)
p.s.
Does the notion of topping the skyscraper with a "crown" indicate its influence by Art Deco? How could you pinpoint it out in our urbanscapes?