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It’s been a while since Philadelphia Will Do has checked in on Penn’s Stephen Morse, online columnist and white Darfur supporter, even if you black people are too busy to support a brother.
Let’s see what he’s up to on the Daily Pennsylvanian’s blog:
One month ago, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron hailed Penn’s newest building, Skirkanich Hall, as “the city’s best new building in years.” Well, Inga, I have no architecture degree, but you should really be out of a job. To me, this building is nothing more than a giant glassy booger. [...]
Speaking of Pottruck, it’s architecturally a pretty cool building. So is Huntsman Hall. But why didn’t the architecture critics step up to bat for these structures? Our side of the Schuykill is also blessed with the awesome Cira Centre, but Inga Saffron arrogantly calls the creation “standoffish.” She also believes that “the difference is that Cira is a commercial office tower and Skirkanich is a work of art.” [...]
Maybe Skirkanich hall is just a butterface, and her real beauty lies on the inside. Editor’s Note: Link to Urban fucking Dictionary for “butterface” not added by me.
Yeah! Why didn’t the architecture critics agree with Stephen Morse, Knower Of Everything?! They should totally lose their jobs — lose their jobs! — so we can get better architecture commentary like “it’s like a booger!” I can’t wait until his treatise, “City Hall: A Piece Of Poop,” comes out.
Skirkanich: One not-so-fab lab [DP's The Spin]
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wait, wait, “maybe” it’s beautiful on the inside? he didn’t even bother to check it out?
yay reporting!
For the record, the writer can’t read, either. I did not call the Cira “standoffish” - some Inquirer copyeditor did and used the word in the headline. Here is my review of the Cira:
BYLINE: By Inga Saffron; Inquirer Architecture Critic
SECTION: FEATURES MAGAZINE; BRIEF; Pg. E01
LENGTH: 1192 words
The Cira Centre, Philadelphia’s first new office tower in 15 long years, is a giant crystal that has emerged from somewhere deep in the Earth. Scratch that. It is the prow of a ship docked at the entrance to Center City. No. It is an iceberg about to crash into the Philly Titanic. It’s a mammoth laser-cut diamond. It’s a towering cathedral, here to bless the city.
Let’s just say this: The beguiling new office tower by Cesar Pelli & Associates is a building that inspires a torrent of metaphors, none of them entirely satisfactory. Though diminutive by modern skyscraper standards - 29 stories - the tower is a fascinating chameleon that changes color with the sky. It is a shape-shifter that looks different from every corner in Philadelphia. We just can’t take our eyes off it.
Cira’s faceted profile has been a fixture on the city skyline for many months, so it’s easy to forget that the West Philadelphia building is only just being completed. The first tenants moved in last week. Its developer, Brandywine Re-alty Trust, won’t celebrate the tower’s opening until mid-November.
But the building is finished enough that we can finally get close and stroll freely through the skybridge at 30th Street Station into its gossamer lobby, a room constructed out of little more than geometry and light.
The Cira’s completion marks a special moment for Philadelphia. These days, it often seems that proposals for new condo high-rises are announced every week. But American cities don’t build office towers like they used to. We’re too busy outsourcing jobs overseas, which is one reason China has cornered the market on office construction. So when a sophisticated office tower like Cira does manage to rise in hidebound Philadelphia, it is tempting to see the city’s future reflected in its flawless silver skin.
Pelli’s New Haven, Conn., firm is one of the most elegant practitioners of office-tower architecture today. The Ar-gentina-born Pelli had turned out a good dozen towers around the world in the last decade, including, most recently, the 42-story Goldman Sachs tower in Jersey City and the 54-story Bloomberg tower in Manhattan.
The Cira, which was overseen by Pelli’s associate principal, Mark R. Shoemaker, and Bower Lewis Thrower of Philadelphia, is one of his best, more sculptural and less blocky than some other recent designs. The tinted, barely re-flective silver windows were an inspired color choice, the glass equivalent of limestone. The silver glass helps marry the delicate modern tower with the weighty, neoclassical train station.
There are, however, plenty of reasons to dislike Cira. Stoked with tax abatements, it has stolen life and taxes from Center City. The wealthy owners of its tenant companies will get away without contributing their share to the public treasury. Yet, despite those generous taxpayer concessions, this building does very little for the public realm.
The Cira, which was built on Amtrak land and with Amtrak’s guidance, claims to be pioneering a new neighbor-hood in that no-man’s-land of train tracks between 30th Street Station and Powelton Village. But it is hard to imagine how such a neighborhood will blossom when no one has yet planned any street connections between the Cira and future development parcels on the 70-acre rail site. You can’t expect to seed a new neighborhood from a hermetically sealed island.
Right now, the tower’s ground-floor entrance near 29th and Arch Streets is virtually unreachable on foot. Most em-ployees will enter through a glass skybridge - nicely designed by BLT - located at the end of SEPTA’s commuter-rail corridor in 30th Street Station. Cocooned in a complex that includes the station’s food court, some Cira workers will never set foot in the gritty city.
The brilliance of Cira’s location is its seamless connections to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, SEPTA’s regional rail and Philadelphia International Airport. Given such fabulous transit links, the tower’s lack of easy access to the Philadel-phia street grid is a bitter pill.
The design of the ground-floor entrance reflects those sorry conditions. If it weren’t for Cira’s jaunty glass canopy, a trapezoid that pops out of a flat facade, you might never be able to identify the entrance doors amid all that silvery glass. The only people who will enter the tower at ground level are those dropped off by taxi in the big circular drive-way.
While there was plenty of concrete for that turnaround, there isn’t much for the sidewalks along Arch Street; they are narrow and stingy. The blame here is not with the architects, the developer or Amtrak. The poor pedestrian condi-tions are a direct result of the anti-urban policies of PennDot and the city Streets Department.
Amtrak had asked PennDot to install a midblock traffic light on Arch Street because it is the most intuitive crossing point between the station and Cira. But PennDot vetoed the request. Instead, it put new lights at the corners of 29th and 30th Streets. As long as those traffic patterns exist, no sensible person will dare cross Arch Street because of the way drivers race around the station. As a result, Cira’s sidewalks were narrowed to discourage people from attempting to walk to the building.
There is no doubt, however, that the tower has reconfigured Philadelphia’s skyline more dramatically than any building since One Liberty Place, completed in 1987. Because of the huge expense of building over Amtrak’s rail yards, it is unlikely that Cira will unleash the same office boom that Liberty did. Still, Amtrak is trying to market several par-cels where the rail lines have been removed.
Cira’s isolation is unfortunate for West Philadelphia’s future development, yet its setting is the source of its impact on the skyline. Its location on the Schuylkill’s west bank means that it is separated from the Center City high-rise crowd. How often does an architect get a stage all to himself?
Pelli was fully conscious that the Cira would be seen in the round, and he strove to make it visually kinetic from all sides. He almost succeeds. Simply by slicing off two corners, he has shaped the east, west and north facades into a dy-namic sculpture. Viewed straight on from the south side, however, the Cira becomes just another staid corporate glass tower.
Philadelphia’s boosters will no doubt make speeches that trumpet Cira Centre as a “world-class building.” It is im-portant to keep things in perspective. Cira isn’t a building that challenges the architectural status quo in any meaningful way. It doesn’t incorporate green technology, as the city’s other office project, Comcast Tower, does. Its form isn’t as daringly original as Norman Foster’s recent London towers. And, of course, it takes no stand about its place in the city.
Without a doubt, Cira is a gorgeous object that we can look at, and admire from afar. The issue for Philadelphia is, as always, whether a remote beauty is good enough.
Changing Skyline / ONLINE EXTRA
View a slideshow of the construction of Cira Centre at http://go.philly.com/cira
Contact architecture critic Inga Saffron at 215-854-2213 or isaffron@phillynews.com
LOAD-DATE: October 14, 2005
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH