I’ve been watching a building going up a block from where I live in Philadelphia. 222 Market Street is a nineteen-story office block. The structure is steel, and except for a couple of odd slanted columns at one end, it is the sort of regular frame of I-beams that engineers have been designing for well over a hundred years; the first steel framed building in the U.S., was Burnham & Root’s ten-story Rand McNally Building in Chicago, erected in 1890. When the Market Street steel was topped off the structure reminded me of the high-rises that Mies van der Rohe put up in Chicago in the 1950s. Mies followed the age-old practice—going back to the ancient Greeks—of expressing the structure in the architecture; in his case in a very bare-bones fashion. That isn’t good enough for the architects of 222 Market (the global firm Gensler), whose approach I can only characterize as Let’s Pretend. The skin of the building, a combination of glass and flimsy-looking prefab glazed brick panels, is designed to give the impression that the building is composed of three-story high stacked-up boxes. In other words, architecture has been replaced by packaging.
LET’S PRETEND
Hello,
Just read your latest posting. Tried to find pictures of the prefab glazed brick panels but no luck. Here is one thing on it…maybe it is 2222 Market Street? https://www.parkwaycorp.com/real-estate/2222-market-street Anyway, in a high wind, that canyon effect that happens in cities, let’s hope people aren’t underneath if the panels start sailing!
I picked up one of my latest Lexus SUVs one fall when Tom Wood Lexus was temporarily in fancy trailers because of such panels being applied to the front of the showroom. Months later I was back for an appointment for something and men were still up high working on the panels. I asked the service writer and she lowered her voice down, saying…”Well, there was a problem….they started leaking and badly….the manager threw a fit when they flooded the showroom after a particularly heavy rain so they started removing them and all this water started pouring out.” She went on to say that now the people were back removing them and putting on new ones….hopefully applying them in a better way!. I told this tale to my wonderful late contractor in KY….he said, “They should have read the package.” That cracked me up!
And another contractor based story….he was encouraged to go over to a subdivision in Franklin TN (he was doing work on a historical property nearby) to see how fast the Hispanic men were laying bricks. He watched a few minutes and then said, “They aren’t buttering the backs.” Yes, they were only putting on a thin and quick amount of mortar. Again, he knew that one day….after a storm, bricks would be on the ground.
Hope you had a nice holiday season. We spent four days cleaning the basement and fine tuning my husband’s home office now that he retired. I cooked some stuff and combined it with things from Whole Foods. That was it! The following Saturday we took 17 old paint cans to the toxdrop place here in Indianapolis. Life goes on!!!
Margaret Huff