61: A Truly Great Tower
What if we could have a truly great tower?
Auckland’s city centre has been progressively developed as a dense core of high-rise office towers in the mid twentieth-century model of an American Central Business District since the 1960s and 70s. The addition of the Skytower in the 1990s gave to Auckland’s skyline a degree of distinction to what would otherwise be a fairly motley and mediocre collection of high rise towers.
While today the skyline from afar looks at once international and distinctive thanks to the beautiful landscape context of harbour, coastal cliffs and volcanic cones, up close on the waterfront and moving about our city streets most towers, even the more recent ones, are pretty dismal and leave much to the imagination.
Wouldn’t it be great if with future development we could have a developer (and to give them confidence, some anchor tenants) that were committed to doing something really unique for Auckland, something that could say something about us, but that also faced out to the world and was in tune with the best of the best high rise development happening around the world.
This is challenging when we only build around one to two truly high rise towers a decade, what with the time it takes for them to get up they often appear dated and old-fashioned from the get-go. Architects usually take a lot of the public flak about these. Often this is not fair; we should be expecting much more of the landowners, developers and their tenants who are responsible for getting these things off the ground. Building tall needs to be understood as a privilege that demands not just quality from the ground up but a sense of delight and wonderment.
We can argue about what that might mean. Indeed we should argue a lot more about the merits of tall buildings. For a better Auckland deserves better tall buildings. Fingers crossed we can achieve one or two in the future.
Stuart Houghton 2014
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Well if they look as stupid as the one in the sketch I hope we dont get any!
As an Architect myself ,I have to disagree, that Architects unfairly take most of the flak. In my view there is no excuse for an Architect producing a lacklustre building. Architects across the world have produced great skyscrapers because they were great architects, who had courage and conviction. The sorry lot who design our skyscrapers in Auckland will never be great architects because they have never had the ability from the start. There is a lack of debate amongst Aucklanders about the quality of the built art we are dished up, mostly because we all know each other and are afraid to rock the boat.
Nemisis – how do architects strike the balance between designing attractive and functional buildings, whilst getting repeat business from their clients/developers? Seems to me that a lot of developers are penny pinching types with no appreciation for aesthetics which must make life hard for architects.
Peddle Thorp Montgomery are usually pretty mediocre architects, but they designed the Metropolis Tower the way they did at the behest of its original owner Andrew Krukziener, who went as far as flying the architects to New York to get an impression of what a tower should look like. The end design was pretty neat, were it not for one small problem: the project bankrupted Krukziener after sales dipped in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.
Have you been inspired by the vertical forest in Milan, the “Bosco Verticale”?
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5558/14275220588_cd8afe940f.jpg
(not sure how to embed a picture in my comment..)