Architects think about massings all the time and how to manipulate them, the perception of shape and space. Size, shape, attitude, interval, and direction, as mentioned in another blog post, are ways that massing is consciously or unconsciously derived from previous design. Some of the best architecture, if not most, has been derived from design from the past. An interesting example is Louis Kahn’s Dhaka National Parliament House and its striking resemblance to the Italian Castel del Monte, built by Frederick II in 1240.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Taliesin home and studio outside of Madison, Wisconsin (below right) may have been derived from a much earlier massing, that of buildings of the Kingdom of Bhutan and its thousand old architecture (below left).
This massing assemblage is seen almost everywhere, including in my own and other neighborhoods:
Another derivative, however unintentional and at a more macro scale, is Sutro Tower in San Francisco. Sutro Tower is inserted into the San Francisco urbanscape similar to how the Eiffel Tower is set in its own urban background.
Sutro Tower has gone through a recent transformation, the removal of its painted metal skin. There have been neighborhood complaints about portions of the metal skin falling into people’s yards. I have also read that to lighten the total load on the tower, the metal skin was removed. This freed up space for new electronic equipment. The original reason for the metal panels was to have a surface on which to apply the red and white aircraft warning pattern as shown below, no longer a requirement now that this warning system is done electronically. Seen below left is after the metal panels were removed and on the right the metal panels as they originally appeared.
In addition, simply as an architectural statement at ground level the scale of it up close, next to neighborhood housing, is startling.
Architect Erich Mendelsohn taught at Cal Berkeley after WW2 (Rodney Friedman was a student of his). But back in Germany before the war, in 1930, he used ribbon windows (a mark of the new modernism) in his design of the Schocken Department Store in Chemnitz, Germany (below left). This same curved façade can be seen later in the 1950’s in one of my favorite buildings as a kid, the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami (below).
There are others, so I anticipate a Derivatives part IV in the future; its fun to look these things up.
Blog Post written by David Tritt, Senior Architect.
