In his initial Edinburgh lecture of 1853 he declared: Ruskin antedated all towers by this first. The city – so un-natured, stripped so bare by its buildings, even – retains a little indoors, just a reminder. Their most refined precedent, however, is Kevin Roche’s Ford Foundation Building, a seminal inversion of modernism’s classic vision: the park’s now in the tower. Portman’s places – which at their most luscious extremes look like Bernini on an acid trip – are inevitably swadled in enough dangling greenery to refoliate the Amazon Basin. These gargantuan atria seek to compensate for the inclemencies of cities befouled by industrial and cultural effluent by appropriating nature. Portman’s places reclaim as void the cancelled space consumed by ordinary towers and offer regulated vistas which, if outer-directed, would encompass the unregulated, uncontrollable, uncertain city. Set within the central space is a cylindrical elevator shaft rising 53 stories, constrained like a pig in a poke. In the case of his Marriot Marquis Hotel in New York City this is literally so. His hotel courts rise so high, buildings can easily fit inside them they’re packing cases for skyscrapers. John Portman, little acknowledged as a skyscraper lion, has, in effect, tuned the skyscraper outside in. The well-dressed executive has not only been the paradigm for occupancy, he’s been the model for the building itself.ĭistended into misnomer by acromegaly, the attenuation of the interior courtyard has soared to unprecedented heights. In the design of the American skyscraper, the architect has almost always been coextensive with the client, a room full of 39 longs, a Mont Blanc in every breast pocket. Amies’ man is the Modular of the Multinational Style. He can be any age he looks forty-five but his bank balance is that of a man of seventy. He reads the Wall Street Journal but he also knows his way around the Museum of Modern Art. He is well aware of all that goes on around him. I was once asked, “For whom do you design? What are you thinking of?” It is an ideal man that we are working for. The town’s leading law firm cannot be suitably housed elsewhere. As once the bank was signified by the gold leaf on its dome, now it requires marble mullions and a reach exceeding the grasp of the Phone Company Building across the street. Skyscrapers are part of the minimum apparatus of American urbanism, joining expressways, domed stadia, air-conditioned shopping malls, and gentrified dereliction. No city of substance lacks a skyline, a clump of spires – however few – that signify the threshold of arriviste urbanity. Where else but the United States could the skyscraper happen? Where else concatenate avarice, ambition, bureaucracy, speculation, underdevelopment, technology, and the waiting grid? While not exclusively American, the tower’s thoroughgoing here, ubiquitous.
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