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Anyway, it sure looks ugly; and I bet they are biting off more than they can chew. I'd prefer our our gas dollars building the "Illinois:", the real thing.
It's hard to believe that they would build a structure just 30 feet shy of the one mile mark. Maybe there's a height restriction limiting towers to 5250 feet.
Ah, but I'd still bet it will be ugly. Pelli came close (mirrored double towers silly IMO), but if they simply want it to look tall for "tall's" sake, it could be as beautiful as the "Illinois", but I doubt it. My guess is that to justify such a challenge/cost it would have to have sufficient "return" as well. Therefore a tall tower with mostly a bloated footprint, buttresses, tricks, etc, is inevitable; A WTC on steroids rather than the thrusting, exquisite termination Wright achieved.
To enter and leave that tree, there will have to be a forest of roadways. Someone once said that if the Illinois had been built in the Chicago Loop, everything else would have to have been razed to make way for the complex of approaches, and that's exactly what FLW would have wanted.
If you watched the Mike Wallace video clip you can hear Wright explain why his design is a mile high. He says the person who commissioned the design asked for it to be that high in order to put an antenna on top to broadcast TV signals. Remember, no cable or satellite TV back then. I think a lot of people thought Wright was nuts having a building this tall. Just go to show you he was just doing what the client requested.
