The Next Step
Well, we finally took the leap! (again) We put a contract on the empty lot above. While this will be our second house, it will be our first “build from scratch”, so wish us luck! We’ve heard good things about the builder, and they’ve been great so far. The neighborhood has kind of an old fashioned town feel with narrow streets and front porches (the houses in the background are not good examples of this).
American Ambition
Santiago Calatrava has designed an impressive 2,000 ft tower for the Chicago water front called the “Chicago Spire”. It’s 150 floors will house 1200 condos; and would be the world’s tallest residential building (and most likely the world’s 2nd tallest building overall – eclipsed only by the Burj Dubai, rumored to be over 3,000 feet tall when completed in 2008).
It’s nice to see America getting back into the skyscraper game with some ambitious plans. I hope to some day visit Chicago and take the multiple elevators necessary to get to the top.
Now if we can just get them to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high “The Illinois”. (Yes kids, thats 5,280 feet, 528 floors).
Vintage Illustrations: Space Needle
Thanks to some good digging by pk at Bibliodyssey, here are some great old illustrations of the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle. I love the color and aging of the paper, and the time and effort that went into creating these images by hand. When these concepts were presented straight from the mind of the illustrator, there was a certain amount of idealism and imagination that meshed with the technicality of architectural drawing, that always tweaks both sides of my brain.
For example the third image in the series has what seem to be bubbles floating above the grounds; and the water in the fountains has a great cobalt blue hue.
Today’s computer generated concepts for proposed buildings can offer great realistic visions for a design, but there’s something lost in these types of images. It’s just all too convenient today to take an actual photo of a location for a proposed structure and superimpose the building almost exactly as it will look in a location.
PK also talks about using Google Alerts to scrounge up some of these illustrations.. gonna have to check that out!
