Architecture

SLIPCOVERS IN THE SKY

Reflective glass has become the mask of architecture. It hides mistakes. It is practical, reducing glare and cutting down on heat. It has visual flash, mirroring the sky and nearby buildings. It bounces sunlight into dark streets. It comes in decorator colors. It is to architecture what double knits were to the garment industry ten years ago. It is everywhere.

Reflective-glass skins have turned buildings into giant slipcovers in the sky. The modernist ethos of “honest” expression of structure and authentic materials is out, and “image” is in. Architects injecting a dose of “high design” into high-rise projects wrap taut, shiny sheaths around steel or concrete frames and carefully notch, tuck, and pleat them to fashion large geometric, abstract shapes. The owners of these creations then confidently announce that the sixty- or seventy-story megalith has “disappeared”—dematerialized in a swirl of reflected cloud formations. At certain times with a certain light, these buildings will do that. But in many cases the situation is more like that of an overweight woman who is assured no one will notice her girth if she wears a gold-lame dress.

This is why the bold attempt to meld a mid-nineteenth-century vocabulary, Gothic Revival, with a mid-twentieth-century material, reflective glass, for the PPG Industries corporate headquarters, in Pittsburgh, is so fascinating. This dubious-sounding amalgam of historicist imagery and contemporary coating succeeds astonishingly well on several specific levels. Even if John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson did not generate a solution that convincingly contributes to the design of the skyscraper per se—on the plane of ideas— the new building can still be appreciated for its absorbing play of light and line. It is a visually riveting building.

Johnson and Burgee have folded and beveled the dark-gray casing to multiply the reflective patterns and vary the surfaces of the PPG complex. By doing so within the lineaments of Gothic form, they have emphasized the sense of verticality inherent in tall buildings: triangular and rectangular pierlike shapes zoom dramatically all the way to the top of the forty-one-story tower, terminating in turrets, pinnacles, and spires at the roof-line. Four six-story buildings and one fourteen-story block—also in reflective glass—are placed around a plaza and linked in the European manner by arcades. All these elements actively integrate the ensemble into the weave of existing streets, walkways, nineteenth-century low-rise brick buildings, and Market Square, nearby.

Pittsburgh, naturally, was eager that the project, planned for a five-and-a-half-acre downtown redevelopment site, provide certain urban amenities (e.g., plaza, shops, and underground garage). Yet the addition of arcades, a “Winter Garden” behind the tower, and a restaurant-atrium space in another building must be credited to the architects themselves and to their client. Through such extras, Johnson and Burgee, architects better known for stylistic bravura than for city planning, have shown a sensitivity to the urban milieu that goes beyond the norm.

Not as much can be said of certain architectural features greeting the eye at ground level. It is difficult to design a pointed arch in reflective glass for a Gothic-style building, as Johnson and Burgee so blatantly demonstrate. The triangular arches of the three-story entrance lobby of the tower are sketchily executed; the portals leading to the Winter Garden from the street are downright clunky. Inside the main lobby, doorways to the elevator lobbies are outfitted with huge, strangely beveled glass headdresses—the sort of bijouterie architecture seen in chichi French jewelry stores.

These design elements act as semaphores waving us back to the basic problem: How do you combine a Gothic vocabulary with a reflective-glass skin and modern steel-frame building when you are dealing with an assortment of elements like doors, portals, piers, and ceilings? We get closer to the underlying disparity by standing inside the arcades and looking up. Instead of the fan or groin vaults that we might expect from the reference to the Gothic idiom, the mosaic-tiled ceilings are uniformly flat. Similarly, the roof of the tower itself is flat, not tapered, the way many Gothic-style skyscrapers are. Even the low buildings of the PPG complex have been given mansard-shaped roofs. While the PPG tower has often been compared to the Gothic Revival Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament in London, designed 1837-60 by Charles Barry, that shorter, older model has a central pinnacle on its spired roof.

In other words, the nagging thought remains that if you removed the reflective-glass casing—as you would remove a tea caddy—you might discover the Seagram Building underneath. Not that finding the Seagram underneath would i be bad; it is just that the PPG is still a slipcover building. As a slipcover, it is more contextual than the minimal sculpture we have been getting, and it is more in keeping with the skyscraper’s : sense of vertically. Also, it acknowledges the early-twentieth-century explorations of the skyscraper as a formal type, when buildings had bases, mid; dies, and tops so that a tall building could be seen and appreciated from the street, from midair, or from afar.

But slipcovers are not architecture. While PPG succeeds on the level of visual effect and urban sensibility, in strictly architectural terms there is not a sense of structure, material, and form brought together in a truly integrated design. Within the larger framework of the “concept,” the PPG solution leaves us in a halfway house of architecture.

While Johnson and Burgee tried to make reflective glass look like both glass and intricately worked stone, the surface quality of reflective glass dominates, partly because it relates more naturally to the rectilinear frame of the actual structure than the Gothic cloak does. As a unique symbol for one of the largest manufacturers of the material, the effort succeeds on a perceptual and impressionistic level. Still, the gesture is one that attempts to make double knit resemble pin-striped worsted. It cannot transcend its inherent contradictions.

Suzanne STEPHENS