Quote:
Originally Posted by HomrQT
I've been with you up until this point. I think the Tribune Tower is gorgeous. An absolute piece of art and our city is very lucky to have such a wonderful building beautifying it. And everyone I've ever shown it to or talked about it with has had the same viewpoint of it being a very beautiful building.
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And that is exactly the point of preservation, finding in value in things even if your
opinion tells you that it's worthless.
My problem with the Tribune is its horrible massing and fugly crown. Seriously, what are those flying buttresses buttressing? It's just a bunch of gothic garbage taked together with no regard for where each architectural device would be used by a gothic architect.
That would be tantamount to an architect in the future when we've figured out how to build buildings with no curtain wall at all and instead use a forcefield to keep the inside and outside of buildings separate and when we levitate floors instead of using steel to hold them up building a building of levitating steel and forcefields and then taking huge chunks of glass and steel to the outside of it and then plopping a giant cube of glass and steel on top. It would look absolute absurd to us just as how the Tribune Tower would probably leave medieval architects completely aghast.
Like I said before, this is only my opinion and I know I'm in the minority, but at one time my opinion was the majority and people took it upon themselves to level many buildings of similar stature to the Tribune Tower just because they didn't like them and thought they looked old and grimy. In fact we still raze dozens of perfectly good classical lowrises each year because people think they look old or just don't care. Hell we almost lost the Cook County Hospital not long ago until preservationists saved it. Again, I'm not a big fan of CCH on its own, but when I look at its historical value, the wonderful diversity of styles it adds to the cityscape, and the irreplaceable handiwork it represents, I see that it must be protected just as how ChicagoHiRiser should see that Prentice has historical value (one of the first designs to use a computer, one of few designs by Goldberg in Chicago, a mainstay Chicago hospital for 30 years), adds to the diversity of styles in the city (nothing looks even remotely like it except Marina City, rare example of flamboyant futuristic design in a buttoned down city like Chicago), and contains irreplaceable handiwork (no one will ever be able to build arched cantaleavers like that again, it is just too expensive to do today). Point is Prentice is something we can't and won't get back if we destroy it. Therefore the individual's opinion is irrelevant compared to the other important things it adds to our city.