Säule, Schlucht, Erscheinung

Sixth Avenue at Rockefeller Center, looking south.  ©1978 Blake Andrews.

NEW YORK, CHICAGO, DUBAI, FLORIDA, SAN FRANCISCO, TORONTO, SÃO PAULO, LOS ANGELES. 

In the last post about Cleveland, I briefly mentioned in passing a unique urban phenomenon, the visual effect of rows of tall buildings arranged along a city street. I've noticed this for years, and mentioning it made me think about its varieties and ways to describe it. While I can't offer an academic analysis here, I'm going to try to briefly explore it a bit further. 

Manhattan, from Carmen Ereddarter's blog.

While others may have long since recognized this phenomenon as well, I am not sure if this urban distinction has undergone appellation. It seems to be born out of uniquely American urban conditions: the downtown cores of classic large American cities, where tall buildings are arranged in orthogonal grids, the blocks equally spaced apart, filling up the envelope of each property in a uniform fashion, so that the fronts of each block align. The buildings not necessarily skyscrapers, but are sufficiently tall as to suggest a wall along either side of the street, as a hedge-row on a country lane, interrupted only by cross-streets. The buildings develop a conversational relationship with one another; each block becomes a component of a larger arrangement. 

3rd Avenue, looking north. Photo from Kelly van der Kwast. 

I. Säule and Zeile

Manhattan would be both the most recognized and recorded, but also the largest and most expressive example of this: the island's density stretching along its numbered avenues for six or seven miles in straight lines. It is one of the most quintessential aspects of Manhattan's appearance, although I am not sure it has ever been specifically given a name, although Manhattan's deep density of full-block buildings has been described as canyons of buildings, which partially describes the phenomenon.

State Street in Chicago's Loop, looking north. 

But it is not limited to New York. Chicago’s Loop expresses this aspect as well, although Chicago's central business district, while quite large, is much smaller and less elongated than Manhattan. The Loop has a clear limit, giving way to warehouse districts and residential areas, whereas Manhattan's avenues vanish, and its cross-streets disappear into the waterfront. Visually, constructed canyons seem carved in each cardinal coordinate.

There are many other examples; as the effect momentarily occurs one street in a small downtown like Cleveland, there are probably countless individual examples in dozens of American cities with a sufficient building stock and suitably wide, straight streets, built up with adequately tall buildings—Washington and Paris are too low to the street to have the affect appear.

A near-appearance of the phenomenon on Commissioner's Street in Johannesburg.

It would be possible to capture this atmosphere in large, grid-array downtowns in Vancouver or Houston, and perhaps Sydney or Melbourne—any place where a forest of skyscrapers is arranged across a rigid orthogonal street pattern, from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Maybe not so much London, Paris, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, but here and there in Johannesburg, perhaps the Ginza ward of Tokyo.

Avenida Paulista, from Wikipedia. 

São Paulo expresses it at least on the mammoth Avenida Paulista, if not elsewhere in its vast forest of high-rise buildings, although the city does not have strict grid system. An interesting detail of Avenida Paulista is the pyramidal Edificio FIESP, photogenic for breaking up the slab-wall affect the regularly-intervaled façades.

Photo of Avenida Paulista and the FIESP Building, by Panoramio user Rmartinipoa.

Downtown San Francisco's financial district somewhat weakly presents this phenomenon, with the added effect of the canyon floor sweeping up the steep hillsides at the far end of each street, or looking out towards the Bay, aligning with the span of the Bay Bridge.

The Streets of San Francisco.

II. Schlange-Schlucht

More linear than the mile-long boulevards of Manhattan are places where dense clusters of high-value real estate are divided into roughly equal sites, but the conditions only yield a single row of high-rise buildings. This is a typically littoral condition: it recalls the heavily urbanized coast of Southern Florida, for example, and other locations where high-rise towers, mostly residential or hotels, march along a main street that follows the coastline, like Cancún. However, in the case of typically-curvacious resort-style architecture, there is not enough alignment for the full effect to register.

The near-effect seen in Sunny Isles, Florida. ©2014 Bauzeitgeist. 

The most distinct difference between this linear row and that of an American downtown is that the arrangement is only one block wide on either side. While not necessarily evident from a straight-on perspective down this one street, the edges of vision, and the visual understanding of the wider urban area, imply that the density discontinues after only one row of buildings.

The best example of this that I know of is Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, which is both long, wide, and evenly spaced with high rises, some extremely tall, columns on either side. Although Dubai is a littoral city, Sheikh Zayed Road itself is away from the beachfront, and the single rows of skyscrapers stand with low-rise buildings behind, or nothing but dry lots of open desert. Dubai's mid-town does not spread across a gridded district of regular built density, but stretches on either side of a single major street.

Images of Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai from Wikipedia and FlashyDubai.com. 

III. Hyper-Schlange Schlucht Straße

Related to the narrow hedge-row effect of Sheikh Zayed Road, a third variety of this phenomenon emphasizes the appearance of tall buildings fronting a significant thoroughfare in an otherwise low-rise environment, often in the case where a major street connects multiple centers of a sprawling metropolis. While the façade-wall effect is visible along the prospect itself, it is no longer set out along a grid of blocks. The hedge-row effect is more clearly understood from above, where the contrast in height is more evident.

Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles.  

The two large examples that come to mind are Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and Yonge Street in Toronto.

If sprawling Los Angeles has a Broadway, it is Wilshire, which curves at several points along the low foothills as it stretches more than a dozen miles, from downtown Los Angeles through affluent West L.A. towards the Pacific Ocean, terminating in Santa Monica. L.A. is perhaps too famous for it’s sprawl, when it really a city of average density, and Wilshire provides one of it’s most distinct urban moments.

Whether by accident of real estate value or determined more didactically by zoning, either side of this thoroughfare is lined with mostly rectangular office blocks, passing through various clusters and campuses of high-rises at downtown LA and Century City, but otherwise distinct from the low-rise and often residential neighborhoods beyond the rows of columns. As with Sheikh Zayed Road, the contrast is most distinct from the air.

Yonge Street is supposedly the longest street in the world, but that's alway struck me as a rather technical description for the world street, as opposed to calling something a road, or a route, which can stretch from one side of a country to another. These are frequently lined with a high density and sufficient volume of bland boxes, which are forgettable alone orchestrate a remarkable visual affect.

Toronto looking north  from the CN Tower ©2011 Bauzeitgeist. 

However, the claim to the title is augmented by the extraordinary phenomenon of Yonge Stretching from the financial district of downtown Toronto for miles to the north. Like Wilshire, Yonge passes through and connects perpendicular clusters of mid-rise buildings where it crosses first Bloor Street and St. Clair, all the way to North York, a suburban district nearly ten miles from the lakefront. The astonishing Vancouverization of Toronto, which has accelerated with the real estate boom in the last ten years, is occurring mostly near the waterfront areas of downtown but is also thickening the effect of this corridor of high-rises, stretching to a length of any of Manhattan's avenues. It is quite convenient to observe this effect without having to board an airplane, as the observation deck of the CN Tower provides an excellent vantage point. 

Toronto looking north  from the CN Tower ©2011 Bauzeitgeist. 

Ihre Welt

Global perspectives, from Franklin Templeton Investments.

International businesspeople discuss pressing matters on the streets. Lift off, zooming out from Street View up into the sky. Big Ben stands squarely at the end of city block. The Crystler Building appears in the distance, with the Transamerica Pyramid just a short walk away. A helicopter view at the crown of Swiss Re, which overlooks the Sydney Opera House. Both the Pearl Orient TV Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center tucked into different parts of the city.

Elevating past a teleconference in a glazed meeting room (Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Sao Paulo on the screens) reveals the twin Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, the Burj Khalifa, followed by the Sears Tower. Up into the clouds, here is Bank of China, then the Burj al Arab (across the inlet from downtown).

All these, with the low-rise of Manhattan, San Francisco, and other cities filled in at their ankles, laid out on what I'm fairly confident began as a satellite image of Vancouver, carved into the face of Benjamin Franklin. A Canadian city, transformed, like Nakeel's World Archipelago in Dubai, into the visage of an American founding father, and sprinkled with the towers of the planet's financial centers.

This is their world.

Amerikanischen Stadtkrönen

BOSTON, NEWARK, BALTIMORE, CHICAGO, SAN FRANCISCO, PITTSBURGH, RALEIGH, CHARLOTTE.

The waiting room of Boston's South Station is a soaring volume, like a high school gymnasium, It is currently made more so, as at present it is adorned with a group of enormous fabric advertising banners, hanging from the ceiling girders, like varsity championship pennants. The adverts were for JetBlue Airways, informing the rail-riding public of all the cities that JetBlue serves non-stop from Boston Logan Airport, which sits a few miles across the harbor from the train station.

Perhaps railway passengers should not, in this age of carbon footprints, be encouraged to travel to Baltimore or Newark by airplane instead of rail at all. Separately, the artistic talent evinced by the banners' graphic design, which seems could be accomplished by an Adobe Illustrator novice in a few minutes, do not deserve much merit in a purely aesthetic sense. However, the ads are interesting in the way represent their subjects, and what this suggests about American cities and their architectural identities.

In this series, multicolored simulacra skylines stand in for the cities of Baltimore, Charlotte, Chicago, Newark, Pittsburgh, Raleigh and San Francisco. Some of these cities are undeniably better-known than others. Non-Americans might not even really know where Charlotte or Raleigh are (both in North Carolina)--which might cause some mutual surprise, given their size and economic might. Several of these cities do not make the top of the list of destinations for either Americans or foreigners, so as advertising subjects they are unusual, and further it is curious to consider the artistic choices made in their simulation.

Two of them, San Francisco and Chicago, are both celebrated as among America's most beautiful, historic, thriving, celebrated metropolitan centers, and also are home to what are arguably some of the country's most recognizable skyscrapers. San Francisco is home to the unique Transamerica Pyramid, an icon of that city. Chicago is home to many well-known tall buildings, but there another pyramidal form, the John Hancock Tower is widely recognized as a symbol of that great metropolis.

The Chicago poster may be my favorite of the lot. It conveys a portion of the Chicago's enormous skyline at a wonderful, theatrical moment in the northern approach down Lake Shore Drive, when that parkway aligns with Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile, marking the beginning of the city center. This humungous entry gate is anchored by several tall buildings, three of which are shown here: the John Hancock Building and the Four Seasons Hotel, with its quad-anchor of faux lanterns on top, and the art deco Playboy/Colgate-Palmolive Building.

Prior the the Hancock's construction, the Playboy building dominated this south-facing perspective of the city center. Originally the headquarters for the Palmolive multinational, the building was refurbished in 2006-2008 into a luxurious condominium tower.

©2007 Bauzeitgeist.

Probably the most well-known icon of all the buildings represented in the JetBlue ad series, the Transamerica Pyramid dominates the representation of San Francisco. The artist has given some more detail to the composition, pairing the pyramid with the unique outline of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, its multileveled guest room wings connected by a translucent spine of glass sky lobbies, its roof capped by decorative masts, giving the whole block a futuristic, insect-like form. Thirdly, the much shorter Embarcadero Center West makes an appearance at the bottom left in orange.

image of San Francisco courtesy of Flickr user m.john16 2007.

Mandarin Oriental and Embarcadero Center West can be seen at left.

Charlotte's visage shows the Bank of America and Duke Energy Headquarters buildings. BoA's tower was one several shiny, paramount regional banking headquarter towers that Cesar Pelli completed in the 1990s in the United States, and in both use, appearance and compositional participation is strikingly similar to his Key Bank Tower in Cleveland.

image of Charlotte courtesy of Flickr user Willamor Media

Raleigh is another North Carolina late-20th century service-industry boomtown. The tallest office building is named for BB&T Bank Building (Officially, 2 Hannover Square) and was built in 1991. At left, the Royal Bank of Canada Plaza, which was completed in 2008, includes several floors of condominiums and is capped by a small steeple.

top image of Raleigh courtesy of Flickr user twbuckner2009

Its not entirely clear, but it seems that the Newark poster is meant to feature the skyline Jersey City, which was built up in the last few decades in the waves of decentralization of Wall Street, and thus serves as a Manhattan version of the Isle of Dogs.

image of Newark courtesy Flickr user Anita363

These low-rise triangles are intended to be the Baltimore Harbor aquarium, the anchor to the urban renewal project of twenty years ago, which transformed the waterfront into a tourism center, a feat which spawned imitation downtown acquaria and boutique retro-ballpark districts throughout the United States and elsewhere.

image of Baltimore courtesy Flickr user Nemeers12010

Pittsburgh's advertisement, though spare, successfully conveys the unique, romantic affinity that so many of its residents and former residents hold for it. It shows one of its yellow river bridges, as well as the "Fifth Avenue Place" building, twenty years on from its erection in the postmodern ebullience (pink granite from Spain, accent granite from Finland) of that brief rust belt renaissance of the mid-1990s. Today its lobby is a tired, half-empty shopping arcade.

The other element in the banner is presumably the old US Steel Building, built in the 1970s as a symbol of America's corporate-industrial might, and still Pittsburgh's tallest building. Its kind of an impressive edifice, especially up close.

image of Pittsburgh courtesy Flickr user peapunk6

Aside from the Skyscraper Page crowd, it would perhaps be a challenge for many to identify these cities based on their skylines alone, much less these 5-minute Adobe Illustrator cartoons of each. Perhaps even residents of these cities wouldn't recognize a drawing derivating from the regional bank tower or luxury hotel high-rise which looms over their metropole. Generically, how many Pennsylvanians would see this and say, 'oh yes, there's old Pittsburgh, and they got the bridge right, too...'

More directly, in terms of its commercial persuasion, I wonder how many in its audience glance up and are convinced by those semi-opaque rectangles to fly to New Jersey. How many erstwhile denizens of Raleigh would see this ad and exclaim "How I long to see the RBC building in real life…that to me is home!"

unless otherwise noted, all images ©2011 Bauzeitgeist.