To be sure, this is no dazzling Frank Gehry piece of architectural sculpture. But it does try to give something back to the city in which it stands. The new aesthetic approach, he says, goes hand in hand with internal shifts, like raised office floors, that allow the workplace to better accommodate computers and adjust to future changes. Now the ideal is to make buildings that seem weightless rather than weighty. People just react to things that are lightweight.
Technology has to do with reducing things.
We're trying to use as much glass we can. A building is not as portable as a cell phone, of course. Ideally, it strikes up some relationship with the structures and the sidewalks around it. In that sense, at least if you believe in adventurous architecture, it may be fortuitous that most of the new office buildings are being built on streets, like Wacker, filled with modern buildings as well as postmodern essays in sculpted glass. On the other hand, city planners will be right to insist that the new towers fulfill the social obligation of the skyscraper.