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Built in 1946-1948, this modern International Style 18-story building was designed by Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to house a hotel, department store, and restaurants, and was the first major modern high-rise to be built in a city in the United States after World War II. The groundbreaking and precedent-setting hotel featured modern art in the public and common spaces, including the lobbies and restaurants, with works by Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Jim Davis, and Saul Steinberg. The hotel’s interior featured self-service push-button elevators, individual thermostats in the room, simple, modern furnishings, a terrace atop the building’s podium outside the hotel lobby, a gourmet French restaurant in the penthouse, and two department stores inside the podium, which originally were a J. C. Penney and a Bond Clothing Store.
The building’s exterior is relatively simple, with storefronts at ground level that are slightly recessed, with the podium being faced by stacked bond red brick above the first floor, with no windows and only a few vents, which was originally intended to advertise the stores within the podium as being ultra-modern with air conditioning and artificial lighting, which meant that they did not need to include windows. The top of the podium is marked by a setback from the edges, with a lower terrace on the east end of the building featuring landscaping and a plaza where guests could relax and view the city, and a higher portion to the west with a long band of ribbon windows, which, along with the terrace and a storefront at the base of the upper tower, remark the transition between the large plinth of the podium containing the department stores and cafeteria below, and the tower containing the hotel above. The tower features strips of ribbon windows that are interrupted by columns and expanses of brick, stacked bond red brick cladding, and is crowned with a penthouse featuring a long line of ribbon windows that terminate at a circular aluminum and glass-clad pavilion at the eastern end, with a set back taller penthouse that contains mechanical equipment for the building’s HVAC system and elevators to the south.
The hotel was sold in 1956 by its original owner, John Emery, to Hilton Hotels, and was renamed the Terrace Hilton. Due to the sale, Emery removed all the modern art from the building and donated it to the Cincinnati Art Museum, where it remains today. The building’s interior was subsequently updated with new finishes in place of the art, but became a much more generic hotel without the character that the art had originally given it. The J. C. Penney in the building’s podium closed in 1968, followed by the Bond Clothing Store in 1977, leaving the lower levels of the building vacant as the department stores followed the exodus of the population of the city to the suburbs. In 1983, the building was purchased by AT&T, whom converted the former department store space in the windowless podium into a call center, but maintained the operations of the Hilton Hotel above. The building was eventually sold by AT&T to a group of investors, with the hotel being rebranded as the Crowne Plaza Cincinnati, which finally closed in 2008. The building has largely sat vacant since 2008 except for a few businesses in the first floor retail spaces, despite several proposals for redevelopment and adaptive reuse, and has been fenced off due to pieces of the facade falling off. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, and was listed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the United States’s most 11 endangered buildings in 2020. A proposal to landmark the building by the City of Cincinnati was rejected over fears that it would jeopardize the building’s redevelopment.
The latest plan, revealed in 2023, would strip the exterior of the building of much of its original character, and is massively inappropriate given the building’s massive international significance, and seeks to radically alter the character-defining features of the building’s upper tower that work far better than the podium. However, the proposal is sadly very characteristic of the nature of proposals for redeveloping and renovating the building, as the building’s windowless brick podium does not allow for much flexibility in reusing the structure, and is very difficult for the public and architecture critics alike to appreciate. The podium leaves developers and the public alike unable to appreciate the parts of the building that are just fine as they are, and should be left alone. Sadly, it appears that the massively significant design of the building, which is important to understanding the origins of postwar urban modernism in the United States, is going to be but a memory in short order.
Александр Шепель
Загородный дом, который располагается на лоне природы, обязательно должен гармонично вписаться в...
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Built between 1970 and 1974, these Brutalist and Modernist towers comprise the Riverside Plaza complex, originally known as Cedar Square West, which was designed by Ralph Rapson and has long operated as government-subsidized affordable housing. Funded by Title VIII of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the complex consists of six buildings with 1,303 apartments, with the tallest building, the McKnight Building, standing 39 stories tall, and being the tallest building in Minneapolis outside downtown. The complex was heavily renovated in 2011 to modernize building systems and the apartment units, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
One of two "pod" schools dating to the 1970s in Jackson County, North Carolina. Circa 1975 building consists of two round classroom "pods," a gymnasium "pod," and an administrative "pod." The school houses grades Kindergarten through 12, with grades 7-12 having been moved into a new, traditional-layout classroom wing to the rear of the original school building.
This image is part of the Modern Architecture in Edinburgh exhibition on www.capitalcollections.org.uk
One of two "pod" schools dating to the 1970s in Jackson County, North Carolina. Circa 1975 building consists of two round classroom "pods," a gymnasium "pod," and an administrative "pod." The school houses grades Kindergarten through 12, with grades 7-12 having been moved into a new, traditional-layout classroom wing to the rear of the original school building.