Quote:
Originally Posted by Nilan8888
My thinking is that, looking at the current design, what is the first, gut reaction. For this it seems to have been negative. Or rather, negative concerning the south tower. I think the North Tower is totally fine, of course.
It's not that cantilever design is bad -- it works great on the library -- it's that here it looks just obvious and awkward. It conveys the message "we totally would have built something more symmetrical, but this other building was in the way".
I'm certainly open to design improvements. But if so many people's first gut reaction to this is negative, dollars to doughnuts that's what most people's reaction is going to be. And most are not going to say "wow, what a bold, daring design", they're more like to say, "wow, that looks really different... and rediculous."
It'll stick out in people's memory, but for the wrong reasons.
|
One last point: I don't mind asymmetry. In fact, I welcome it to our family of towers downtown. Most of our buildings are all very similar: rectangular towers and, because of height restrictions and (ZZzzzzZ) view planes, many of them not very tall, so we even have this symmetrical "counter top" skyline, to an extent, when seen from afar.
Of course, this won't change the counter-top, but it would certainly bring some variation to designs around there. Another rectangular tower using facadism for heritage preservation is innovative for Halifax (because we haven't actually been building anything downtown for 20 years) but it's certainly not innovative or interesting more generally.