Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
Modernist Ziggurats
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| There's a certain kind of building around downtown and midtown. They were built between the mid-1950s and 1961 and are basically filler buildings. I call them Modernist Ziggurats. Their set-back form is dictated by the zoning regulations in place between 1916 and 1961 but their facades are influenced by the International Style, making them kind of bastard children of New York, high rise architecture.
Some Links: - Equitable Building [as seen from the World Trade Center], the 1914 building that prompted the original zoning regulations which said that office towers had to have set-backs and lead to the distinctive ziggurat look of pre-war buildings in Manhattan. - Metropolis of Tomorrow, the book by Hugh Ferriss with lots of brooking, gotham-like sketches of ziggurat buildings. Published in the mid 1920s. - Seagram Building, the Modernist classic by Mies van der Rohe and influential in having the zoning regulations change to encourage open plazas in exchange for higher floors. |
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 | Hi. I'm a 32 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |