Box is a Box is a Box

or..... ding dong ding dong, 110 Eleventh Avenue
(box based and box tower + textured facades)

but that the New Yorkers can hope for from it...
here comes the boxes of Mercer 40 (stacked boxes)

or ,worse... 200 Greenwich Street, aka " tower 2" at
GROUND ZERO (box with chamfered top)

but the "foster" ' s New York equation "adds up"
to so much less... the Hearst Tower (box with chamfered corners) =>...

Of course, I'm being provocative. The most worrying prospect is that
Philip Nobel is depressed.
Depressed that ( Norman Foster + London = 30 St. Mary Axe ) =S

So it was that, opposed to "heroic and original" ducks, the authors, €” inspired by the schlock commercial architecture of the Las Vegas strip, prescribed an "ordinary and ugly" alternative: decorated sheds. Exactly as mundane as they sound, decorated sheds were buildings, where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them.

The authors nicknamed "heroic and original" buildings

ducks, after a duck-shaped poultry stand on Long Island that appears in Peter Blake's 1964 book God's Own Junkyard. These were buildings where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form
kind of building " A-becoming-sculpture."Is Philip Nobel, the "resident curmudgeon" of Metropolis magazine, going soft already? Probably too soon to tell, but historians of such things, do such people even exist

yet? ~ may well look back on this moment and say that this was when Philip Nobel started to lose it. Asked why, they will say that it was one part Nobel, one part never-ending crisis of Modernism, one part New York Times Building and, oh, 10 parts New York.




The new Times building is even more of a "stack"
than the Hearst...
But it's not fine! Not fine at all :p