As I wrote one year ago this week, there was a mysterious cable strung between the two iconic towers of Detroit's Lafayette Park. This cable has now vanished as enigmatically as it existed, leaving us with what may have been Mies' ultimate vision — two free-standing buildings, untethered to each other, with a vast, angular negative space between.
As I stated in the earlier post, I was content to let the reason for the existence of the cable remain a mystery and I still am, however, it seems clear now that the cable's function may have become outdated in today's world. Which means our modern age has made the most modernist of architects even more modern.
As I also said, the cable was hard to capture in photographs. Below you will see it stretched from the center of the eastern tower in an older picture. (click photos to enlarge).
ahhhh, now I get it. less (posts on this blog) is more.
ReplyDeleteGordon Matta-Clark called. He wants to make some cuts in those buildings to let the daylight in.
--LtD
I think someone finally got caught stealing cable tv from the other tower.
ReplyDelete~HATR.
Let's check these buildings out later this summer. I want to get a close look at them.
ReplyDeleteToday, we have Wi-Fi, and that's great, but maybe in the fifties all they had was Hi-Wi. A high wire, where some little French dude tip toed across it to deliver messages to the other building. Yeah, I'd bet a million bucks that's what that cable was used for.
I watched Massimo Vignelli give a lecture in Lansing a couple of years ago and his best line of the evening, when describing his Modern aesthetic, was "Addition is stupid, but subtraction is genius." That's one of those oddly perfect philosophies that I'll remember forever.