appendix A — tower precedents

The following precedent studies* were conducted in order to gain a familiarity with the tower typology. In particular, I wanted to get a sense of what the common issues, aspirations, and limitations are when faced with tower design.

The towers are shown in chronological order.

*I did not author any drawings, only collected them and made my own notes in red.

Building

TATLIN’S TOWER

Empire State Building

Radiant City

year 1930 architect Le Corbusier engineer location tabula rasa status unbuilt height 220 m material structure program office floors 72 note one of most influential/ controversial modernist European urban planning schemes vertial density with expansive landscaping between highway/parking integrated inquiry social reform verticality vs horizontality

860-880 LAKE SHORE DRIVE APARTMENTS

location

Chicago, Illinois, USA status built height

82 m material steel glass structure steel frame column grid program residential floors 26 note contraversial I-beam mullions

“skin-and-bones”

900-910 Lake Shore Drive built three years later inquiry efficiency and clarity

Johnson Wax Research Tower

Torre Velasca

WORLD TRADE CENTER (1973-2001)

year 1966 architect Minoru Yamasaki engineer Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson

Leslie E. Robertson Associates location Manhattan, NY, USA status destroyed height 417 m (north tower)

415 m (south tower) material steel concrete structure framed tube

Vierendeel truss central core program office floors 110 note 9/11 attacks inquiry balancing open space and extreme height

WILLIS TOWER (SEARS TOWER)

LLOYD’S OF LONDON

HSBC BUILDING year 1979 architect Foster + Partners engineer Ove Arup & Associates location

Central, Hong Kong status built height 183 m material steel glass structure exterior steel truss program office floors

47 note first tower without a central core large central atrium bank of mirrors attention to GL plaza prefabrication inquiry public space, openness

Turning Torso

year 2001 location MalmÖ, Sweden status built height 190 m material reinforced concrete steel aluminum facade structure central core exterior steel frame program residential office floors 54 note world’s first twisting tower leaning windows makes interior feel twisted inquiry dynamic structure architect

OMA engineer Ove Arup & Partners location Beijing, China status built height 237.5 m material steel glass structure external diagrid program office tv studios subway station floors 51 note denser diagrid indicates higher stress cantilever is 15 storeys dynamic form appears small or big depending on angle Public Loop allows visitors to see TV making process inquiry three dimensional tower

Burj Khalifa

Leeza Soho

March 29, 2020, 10th night of the lock-down.

Six architecture students (Nick, Arnold, Lisa, Derek, Vincent, Hussam) are quarantined in a house. They begin to cook for each other each night. After dinner, they have a round of beers and gummies. The following is their honest, naive, sort of funny, slightly depressing, conversation* on beauty, food, and architecture.

Deliciousness, like beauty, is subjective but it’s also not. Like, there’s some sort of universality about the subjectivity. It’s a crowdsourcing of subjectivity. That’s why some restaurants are so popular, many subjective opinions have deemed it good.

Can something be beautiful, but also overlooked? Like it can be underappreciated at the same time?

Depending on how you look at it?

But then everyone can say that about anything?

I guess so. But a defense to that is to say, ‘well then everything is delicious.’ Because everyone can say this is their favourite meal. Yeah, sure. Everything can be delicious. But there are things that are more commonly delicious. Commonly delicious foods that people can agree on, even if they are newly created and not a classic meal. And that’s strange. That’s weird. That shows that deliciousness is also universal.

But food has an advantage because you can replicate food. Whereas buildings are much more difficult to replicate, as far as experience. So to have that shared spatial experience amongst many people, is way harder.

But buildings are not ephemeral. Your experience of them doesn’t take them away. So in some ways, the experience of a building is more replicable, because that building continues to exist and everyone goes and checks it out, but no one can eat the exact same meal because after you consume it, it’s gone.

But the recipe can be shared. So you can transmit the idea much quicker across many people, and you can have a consensus much faster.

Even though you can share the recipe, you still can’t replicate the meal the same way.

According to Kant in his Critique of Judgment, taste is founded upon two conflicting conditions: that it is subjective, and that it is universal.1 The idea that taste is subjective is straightforward and widely accepted, but claims for universality are still debated.

For Kant, judgments of taste are ultimately judgments of beauty. Moreover, he believes that when we declare something to be beautiful, we are automatically making a claim to universality.2 That is, everyone should agree with the claim, and those that disagree are simply wrong. Additionally, the idea that one can be correct or incorrect about ‘beauty’ implies that judgements of beauty have moral ramifications, which distinguishes ‘beauty’ from what is merely ‘nice.’ Kant writes, “...this claim to universal validity so essentially belongs to a judgment by which we describe anything as beautiful that, if this were not thought in it, it would never come into our thoughts to use the expression at all, but everything which pleases without a concept would be counted as pleasant.”3 To put it simply, beauty is not a thing to be tossed around so lightly.

Conversely, some find this argument too absolute and too rigid. They believe beauty should be able to be found in anything, and that anyone should be capable of experiencing it. To this end, neurobiologist Semir Zeki says, “Beauty, like consciousness, is difficult to define. But, like consciousness, it has two characteristics that most, if not all, are agreed on - that all humans are capable of experiencing it and that it is a highly subjective experience.”4 While this may be true, it makes beauty susceptible to relativism, which eludes definition and criticism. It is unproductive to silence disputes of taste by defaulting to, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” implying there is nothing more to say. Experiences of beauty may be individually subjective, but architectural beauty is different in that its formation is a collective endeavor.

Architecture, unlike other objects of design, imposes itself upon a public. While the carpenter can put together a table without having to consult anyone, the architect cannot build a train station out of sheer personal impulse, and he most definitely cannot build it alone. Roger Scruton, a philosopher, writes, “It is not enough for an architect to say: I like it, or even: I and my educated colleagues like it. He has to justify its existence, and the question is whether he and his colleagues are right...The search for some kind of coordination of tastes is forced upon us by our nature as social beings.”5 Perhaps Kant overstretched when he insisted for a universal agreement, but it is fair to say that ‘individual’ taste remains a public matter because each person’s sense of beauty will always be influenced by the society in which they participate. Even if the terms of agreement are constantly evolving, as long as we continue to dwell amongst others we will continue to seek aesthetic harmony.

1 Kant, Kant’s Kritik of Judgment.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Zeki, “Beauty in Architecture.”

5

That’s true, but there is still an essence that gets carried.

An idea, a concept.

Yeah. There is a concept that gets carried over, and no matter what little changes...People will say, ‘I like...well, I like, hamburgers.’ And even though there’s many different kinds, there’s some sort of commonality that links all these hamburgers.

Pause.

We also have a bias to preferring food that we’re like, familiar with, that we grew up with. Right? So there’s maybe certain flavours that you’ll never get on board with, no matter how beautiful or beloved they are by someone else.

Yeah. Right. But you can always acquire things over time.

It’s said that as an adult, you need to taste something ten times before you can get used to the taste, if you always thought that you hated it.

Pause.

But it’s like comparing an apple to an orange and trying to find a reason why they are connected, while they are still two fundamentally different things.

But they’re both food.

Yea. Architecture and food are both kinds of experience. But the scale is so different.

Why is the scale so different?

Can you eat a building?

I can be eaten by a building. Snickering. It’s...well...yeah.

But it’s not about comparing the two experiences against each other, but more that architects aren’t willing to talk about beauty, but chefs are willing to talk about deliciousness. What is good and what’s not. For some reason, architects find it much harder to talk about beauty.

BEAUTY’S DISAPPEARANCE

Today, architects don’t seem so keen on talking about beauty. Not that there is a lack of beautiful architecture in the world, but that there is a lack of genuine conversation about beauty itself.

Its dismissal is accounted for by a variety of arguments. In a society that rewards optimization and relentless efficiency, beauty struggles to hold its ground (see Form and Function). This is further exacerbated by architecture’s system of critique by jury (see Justified), which favours the architect or student who is able to bolster their design with exact numbers and profit estimates, claims that seem like truths, but are just as relative as aesthetics. Or, perhaps it is because beauty, being associated with superficialities, can’t be trusted with cultural content (see The Sense of Sight), and its seductive characteristics are too often exploited by those in power (see Power Struggle).

Nonetheless, beauty continues to linger quietly, when one sketches a parti, when one wonders which would be more appropriate, a flat or pitched roof? At the privacy of our desks, we might make such decisions in the name of beauty (whether we are conscious of this or not), only to invent a more rational excuse involving snow loads or daylight factors when asked, ‘but, why?’

The following transcript reflects on six students as they candidly explore what contemporary conversations about beauty could be, and the value these conversations could bring to mainstream architectural discourse.

Because the beauty of architecture is only one part of it.

But there’s so many aspects to food. There’s more than just deliciousness. There’s plating, there’s tweaking of the recipe, the way it was handed down to you...

Because all the things you do are to enhance the taste. It’s all connected to that. It’s the only goal. Whereas in architecture the goal is not to make something that looks good.

But there’s also sometimes the goal of making food economical. Like, how much food can I make for this price? If I have to feed a hundred people, how can I make something halfway decent, but can feed many? Deliciousness is not always the goal.

But there is a goal in architecture.

What’s that?

(laughing) Yeah, tell me.

A MEANS OR AN END?

Here we start to distinguish the difference between beauty as a means, being a single part of a larger process, and as an end, the holistic unity of all parts. Beauty as an end takes into account a myriad of factors that all contribute to a building’s overall effect, many of which are out of the architect’s control. This kind of beauty only becomes evident after the building has been constructed and takes on a life of its own, revealing its richness over time. It is not possible for an architect to pre-emptively draft this beauty into the plans and sections. It can only be hoped for.

Beauty as a means, on the other hand, is fully within the realm of the architect because it is a matter of how the building should look, a very real part within the whole of architectural design. It also should be made clear that beauty as a means is not the same as beauty as an approach. Architects who use beauty as an approach, or as their main motivation, are accused of prioritizing aesthetics at the expense of efficiency and utility. This obviously can be problematic, but critics to this approach commit an equally egregious act by operating on the other extreme end of this spectrum. Visual beauty is sacrificed to satisfy cost, code, and structure, which renders the building just as incomplete but somehow, this outcome has become more acceptable. Aesthetics, however, just like cost, code, and structure, are not optional for a building. Venturi famously wrote, “An architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.”1 A building that embraces its tangled web of parts is one that accepts and confronts the difficult circumstances of its design. It is one that, in addition to everything else, is conscious of its appearance.

Good architecture.

Yeah, but we can’t agree on that either.

We can’t agree on it, but same with people who can’t agree on delicious food, but deliciousness is debated all the time. We just don’t talk about it in architecture.

But could it be that chefs are working at a different level? Chefs are working at a higher class where the functionality of the food is related to the taste. It is not to like, pump out as much you can with less money, it’s not about...

But I think you can still have delicious food on every level. And it should be the same with architecture.

Then the word beauty might change. Maybe you have a social housing that is super cheap and helps everyone, but it doesn’t look beautiful because “poor” people live in it and you associate it with...whatever. Like, the building could be a success and be hideous.

Then maybe we need to expand our definition of what a maybe that hideous building is actually beautiful building is? And then beautiful?

The argument is that the cook talks about deliciousness, and architects don’t talk about beauty... but the cook can talk about deliciousness and beauty.

Yes...but that is also assuming a certain definition of beauty. I think we are trying to map these two together, just to see if it’s instrumental, if it’s helpful to learn from culinary arts. A way to talk about our work as creatives. Chefs are able to, because they have ‘delicious,’ a word that is theirs. Whereas ‘beauty,’ as you said, has also been co-opted by them. They can call their food beautiful, but we can’t call our buildings delicious unless we’re really creepy.

But it’s hard, too, because most likely when you talk about a beautiful building you probably haven’t walked into it. You only have seen pictures of it. The only experience you have with most ‘beautiful’ buildings, is image-based.

Yeah, so the metaphor of deliciousness reveals the problem with that. How food is not just about taste, but also how it looks before you taste it. So we should not only rely on our sight to judge a building’s value, much like how we shouldn’t judge food’s value just by taste.

So then the argument you have about beauty can’t be with buildings you haven’t visited, because...you can’t talk about beauty in a building that you have only looked at.

Yes. There’s an aspect of uncertainty when you haven’t actually been there. You can speculate that maybe it is, but you can’t be sure unless you go.