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Old Posted Mar 16, 2010, 5:44 AM
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ardecila ardecila is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: the city o'wind
Posts: 16,383
Roosevelt's tower has quite a good design, but I don't like all the glass on the 5-story box at ground level. They make the entire street frontage glass, which is really shirking away from the context of two beautiful historic buildings in stone and terracotta, respectively. It would be better if the base were a more solid, opaque material, with the glass tower protruding from it

In addition, the fact that the glass is set back from the streetwall by 4 or 5 feet creates a rather disconcerting illusion that makes the facades of the Fine Arts Annex and the Auditorium Building look like odd freestanding structures, with nothing behind them. You can see how the reflection of the Fine Arts Annex creates this "pillar effect" in the rendering below. If I didn't know better, I'd say the architects were trying to play a sly trick based on the skin-deep notion of a facadectomy. Even if they were, though, it's not really appropriate to do that to the Auditorium, which still has all of its architectural innards (praise be to God).

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