Placing Words by William J. Mitchell

Author:William J. Mitchell [SPi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262250535
Publisher: MIT Press

17 Manolos

It’s hard to imagine Mies van der Rohe in sneakers. He created big, black, shiny office towers for men—like himself—wearing big, black, shiny shoes. If there’s any geist in a zeit at all, it seems to show up in an uncanny connection between footwear fashions and architecture.

You can see this in the relationship of pointy medieval shoes to pointed gothic architecture (though goth shoes are now, of course, something quite different); Birkenstock sandals to the mellow, woodsy, sixties forms of Sea Ranch; R. M. Williams elastic-sided work boots to Glenn Murcutt’s minimalist bush houses; and blobby Air Jordans—already retro by the time architects caught up—with the fashionably blobby buildings of the early 00s. When the new design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site was recently unveiled, the shoe linkage was obvious; we were seeing the upturned heel of a Manolo Blahnik. It looked as if David Childs and Daniel Libeskind had found the parti beside the bed of one of those Sex and the City girls.

If you consider the structural logic, it isn’t surprising. Both Manolo spikes and world’s-tallest-building candidates depend for their dramatic effect upon breathtakingly excessive height combined with improbable slenderness. There is a lot of vertical load, which can punch heels through floor covering and tower footings through bedrock if the bearing surface is too small, but the real structural issue is lateral loading. These engineering wonders cantilever from their attachment points, creating the danger of bending and snapping under wind loading or the eccentricities introduced by a wobbly gait. In both cases, the most elegant answer is a form that tapers prettily from a broad base to a tiny tip.

Between the base and the tip, so long as you maintain adequate dimensions at each level, there is a good deal of freedom to sculpt and texture the surface. Blahnik has always been astonishingly, joyously inventive with slinkily flowing lines, bright colors, and polychrome patterns. Similarly, over the decades, New York architects have gone from the stepped profiles of early twentieth century skyscrapers to the mid-century modernist severity of the original World Trade Center towers, and most recently to sleek, shoe-designer twirls and curves. The Freedom Tower’s floor plate is a lozenge that rotates and shrinks as it ascends 70 stories, producing a smoothly warped shape on the skyline that cleverly slims down the bulk of 2.6 million square feet of office space, and would not be out of place in patent leather. The torqued floor plate motif has an immediate (if somewhat stubbier) precedent in Frank Gehry’s Neue Zollhof office towers in Düsseldorf, and in a recent Gehry design for a vodka bottle—yes, I know, vodka with a twist!

You don’t get to the symbolic 1776 feet specified by Libeskind’s competition-winning master plan with 70 stories, and beyond about 70 stories—as Childs no doubt calculated— adding office floors makes little economic sense, so something had to be done to fill the gap. A 400-foot lattice structure, containing wind turbines, gets part of the way.

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