green band-aid

' In the larger picture, green architecture is still nothing more than a band-aid treatment where major surgery is required'

there truly is something wrong with the system. our recent partisan political scandal surrounding the 'debt ceiling' has solidified our own people's disgust with the present state of american [and/or international] politics



look - even the conservatives have turned into lunatics! image from Mike's MoosRoom, a pretty hilarious-looking conservative blog... its amazing what happens when some people learn photoshop!!

there is something fundamentally off in our cultural spirit, and it is captured in the spirit of our architecture. as far as i can see, most high profile architecture is some metaphor of sex and technology - certainly most renderings are! like images we see everywhere around us, for the majority of people it is removed, something for us to look at, desire, lust, but never have. this building is a perfect, singular example:



nobody can deny the technological triumph of this building with its crazy bent-over cantilever and bridge like morphology. the expressed diagrid surely delights countless engineers and scraper-lovers. there was a bit of controversy about the building's inspiration, however when the two tower project was rumored to be a bit of a perverted joke. it was implied by koolhaas that sexual imagery inspired the form - you can see it better from the interesting perspective:



an ironic inversion seems to be what koolhaas was doing here. most towers, historically, have been claimed to celebrate masculine genitalia. it seems OMA aspired to create a female towering form which could perhaps emasculate and simultaneously consume the phallic agression of all the skyline's previous skyscraper phalli - including its direct partner.

regardless of his intellectual irony [at best obscure commentary but more realistically finally a formal gesture] OMA never offers a solution but rather a celebration. but the system remains intact, spectacularly reinforced: its still about sex and technology. domination, seduction, control, and commercialism.
and you just can't cover that boner with a green band aid.