Quote:
Originally Posted by XIII
What are your thoughts on the revised proposal? I am genuinely interested.
Do you think this solved the prior issues? What would you suggest as improvements?
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Yes, it's a significant improvement but I still have serious issues.
With the addition of the '2nd vocabulary' as depicted in the restaurant 'box' and the ballroom 'bustle' as a tool to transition to the street and the eastern neighbor, it would almost seem that Jeanne is a fan of this thread...

(although it appears the eastern 'bustle' still has vestiges of the frustum slope... I wish it was just a simple box like the one over the road)
I appreciate the simplification of the glazing treatment and the elimination of the balconies on the primary facades...
they have also appeared to have eliminated the 'dead cat' wedges that existed between wanda, gems to the west, and the existing building to the east...
from an urban planning standpoint, as far as connectivity to the rest of LSE, it's excellent, and the landscape designers have suggested a pretty sweet contribution...
my criticism is still on what generated the overall 'frustum', or should I say 'chocolate bar' form, now somewhat complicated by the 'glazing gradation',
and Gang's explanations just makes it worse...
it doesn't reflect a
structural solution (in fact, it just made the prior structural solution so expensive, it had to be tossed)
it doesn't focus
views to the sky
and the river (the angles now are slight, and even more importantly,
ALL of the glazing is angled slightly up, even on the supposed downward facing facades!)
it doesn't contribute to any
greening effect due to the shallowness of the frustums and again, the fact that
ALL of the glazing is angled slightly up and therefore exacerbating heat gain...
the explanation of the
'stepping down' of the volumes to the lake I also find suspicious and question why that is even desirable to repeat if, in fact, it exists... certainly it won't exist for long when future tall towers are built at the Spire site and the NE corner of LSE... it probably had more to do with orientating the two large roof terraces toward the lake, which is fine, just admit it...
and finally, I don't buy the
'glazing gradation' explanation... size of the floor plates are irrelevant to heat gain when said floors are broken up into a variety of rooms... it is simply
decoration and an attempt at an 'Aqua' effect and should be identified as such... it is a matter of opinion on whether that decoration is successful or not...
so, it comes down to whether we think all of the effort and expense of creating the frustums is worth it over more conventional volumes... I think we can agree that the experience of being in the volumes at this point in the design would be more or less the same whether these forms were flat sided or not...
for example, all of that frustum generated expense, design, planning, construction, etc. could have been put toward, I don't know, developing a structural exoskeleton for the east and west towers that supported the lowest tower in the middle... anyway, there would be infinite ways to create unique form that inherently reflected form and function (see Gang's mentor, Rem Koolhas and most of his work)