Quote:
Originally Posted by CHI -21c
Wanda is facetious; 2 Prudential is dignified... as are the Hancock and Trump. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece to look serious.
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I'm sorry, but pomo, particularly 2 Pru, is the Comic Sans of architecture. There is nothing "serious" about Pomo. In fact, Postmodernism in architecture is virtually synonymous with playful and eclectic. It's literally the opposite of serious. Like I said, I think 2 pru is a decent building and don't have the abject hatred of pomo that some on this board do, but to suggest that 2 Pru is "serious" and that it "complements" Chicago is absurd. That building is about everything that Chicago is not.
If you wanted to talk about a building that actually is serious and actually complements Chicago you could have used Big Stan / Aon as your example which literally overshadows 2 Pru. If anything I see this Wanda design having a lot more in common with 2 Pru and postmodernism than with classic Chicago architecture. What about 2 Pru is form follows function? Literally nothing. It doesn't even belong in the same book, let alone sentence as Hancock or other Chicago classics. Wanda, just like 2 Pru, has several "arbitrary" design motifs, but like I said about 2 pru, that alone doesn't make it ugly or bad design. If picking arbitrary shapes were a crime against architecture, then you could say that Mies' 860-880 is criminal for totally ignoring the unique shape of it's site in favor of glass boxes. Remember that one of the fundamental concepts of capital M Modernism was separating the form of the building from the site. Placing two square boxes on a trapezoidal site seems pretty arbitrary to me...