Transformations

Adolf Loos’s entry for the Chicago Tribune competition, from The international competition for a new administration building for the Chicago Tribune, MCMXXII:

The architects at Hollwich Kushner have engaged in a fascinating exercise: reimagining existing buildings as if they were designed today. The article makes a mention of code and zoning changes but the real issue here is style. The Irving Trust Building at One Wall Street is an Art Deco masterpiece, but it’s hard to imagine corporate executives opting today to cover their headquarters  with fluted stone panels.

There’s another dynamic here, that can be easily seen in another field. I recently discovered Postmodern Jukebox and have been listening to a number of their albums. They’ve created a new genre, in my opinion, by taking current-day popular songs and performing them in mid-twentieth-century styles. The songs sound great even though switching them from rap, country, rock, or pop to jazz, r&b, or wing completely changes their feel. These transformation prove that a lot of what might seem to be the essence of a song is actually style that can be changed without changing the lyrics or melody. Transfer this idea to architecture: what “is” the Irving Trust Building? It’s a tall, slender, steel-frame building with a facade that emphasizes its size by breaking the wall planes up into many small pieces. The “steel-frame” part is important, even though it’s not directly visible, since the numerous small setbacks that are an important part of the visual effect would have been difficult to build using a different structural system.

The exact skin of the building and the exact massing of the setbacks are not as necessary to the “Irving Trustness” of the building. So the Hollwich Kushner modernization works visually: it has the same essence as the real building in a more modern style.