84034 New Forms Taschen 057

Sir Norman Poster Torre de Collserola Barcelona. Spain, 1988-92

Conscious of the architectural heritage of Barcelona and of the highly yisible hilltop location of this telecommunications tower. Poster has placed great emphasis on the extremely light naturę of his intervention. This is a moder-nity in tune with the far-reaching impact not only of telecommunications but also with a society which is morę and morę domi-nated by electronics in generał.

Tali Buildings

Although it is clearly in Asia that the concept of the very tali building is being given a new lease on life, the demand for such structures still exists in the West. The true urban density required to make tali buildings economically viable in the most obvi-ous sense probably does not exist in very many cities. Indeed, the logie behind the tower may often be one related to the ego of its builders. An obvious symbol of suc-cess or power, towers will tomorrow mark the contemporary Asian city much as they did the American metropolis throughout the twentieth century. As Paul Goldberger has written, 'Surely morę than any other type of building, the skyscraper is both quintessentially American and quintessentially of the twentieth century. It emerged in the nineteenth century and owes a certain debt to European architec-ture, but it was in the United States in the first four decades of this century that the skyscraper became not a curiosity of commercial architecture, but a bold force, a force as powerful in its ability to transform the urban environment in its time as the automobile was to be in the decades succeeding."¹²

Though it may not be the most typical example of the American skyscraper, one New York project, Arquitectonica's 1995 42nd Street building, will be cited here simply to demonstrate the continued vitality of this building type in the United States. A cooperative venture of the Disney Corporation and the Tishman Urban Development Corporation, this multi-building complex, meant to symbolize the rebirth of Times Square, is scheduled to open on January 1, 2000. Located at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, the building is designed to look like an exploding meteor. Arquitectonica, who won this project in a competition over Michael Graves and Zaha Hadid, will design a forty-seven-story tower for a

62 Urban Stratecies