![]() The building’s sheer, featureless facade, barely interrupted by narrow columns of tiny windows, is an expression of the this process - a single, uninterrupted pour of concrete, purportedly the second-largest single pour of concrete worldwide (if you ask the university), behind only Hoover Dam. As modernist architect dallied into Brutalism, though, the use of the process to build an entire occupiable building was inevitable. For the first half of the century, it was primarily used for utilitarian constructions - grain silos, communication towers, elevator cores, and the like. Think of a Play-Doh extruder, but on a skyscraper scale. Slip-form construction, in short, involves a continuous pour of concrete through a single form that’s slowly jacked up as the building rises. In the early 20th century, a process was created to simplify, streamline, and speed up this process - slip-form construction. When building tall, it can be a laboriously slow process of assembling the forms, pouring, waiting for the concrete to cure, disassembling them, moving up, and repeating. When using concrete as a major building element, the most costly and time-consuming aspect of the project is formwork - the molds, usually wood or metal, that the concrete is poured into. And this design was no accident, but rather a bold statement of new building technology. While the building indeed has weathered poorly in its half-century of existence, its general appearance is much the same as the day it was built. For one, blight implies a sense of decay, a once-grand building weathered by age and disuse. To call it a blight would be to both undersell and misrepresent its aesthetic statement. It’s a massive, sheer slab of blank concrete sixteen stories high, the only ornamentation a slight flaring at the top supposedly intended to recall classical column capitals but more reminiscent of the feet of upturned Lego mini-figurines. Largely, they succeeded - a campus defined by blocky, utilitarian post-war buildings and massive surface parking lots slowly gave way to an integrated fabric, weaving sculpted ribbons of green space through a parade of architectural wonders.īuilt in 1969 to house the university’s growing Chemistry department, Crosley Tower looms over the northwest corner of the campus like a cartoon supervillain’s lair. Star-chitects like Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman and Thom Mayne were brought in to shape an eclectic vision of the campus of the future. It was conscious move, set forth in a 1991 campus master plan, intended to transform a dowdy urban commuter school into a distinct destination. ![]() The University of Cincinnati, nestled on a tight superblock in a dense old neighborhood, has spent the last three decades collecting architecture by some of the world’s most renowned architects. I want to talk about a handful of buildings I’ve experienced in my life, and things they’ve meant to me, in ways either large or small.įirst, I want to talk to you about a terrible building. It’s never appealed to me and I suspect it doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a great deal of pretension, of empty theory and academic word salad, of trying to prove that you’re smarter than your reader by making what you’re saying utterly inscrutable. ![]() Wait, stay - no, I don’t like the way most architects write about architecture either. You may or may not know this about me, depending on how you’ve come to this newsletter, but in my daily, non-internet life, I’m an architect. ![]() I want to talk to you about some buildings. ![]()
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