Trip to Philadelphia for President’s Day weekend. A city where great American architects were based, like Louis Kahn and Venturi/Scott Brown.
Apart from some impressive historical buildings, amazing examples of modernist architecture (I. M. Pei‘s Society Hill towers, a concrete Mies sitting beautifully on a hill) and postmodernism (Venturi and Rauch’s Guild House, or how to relate intelligently to the American welfare’s official style: blocks of red brick).
However, the biggest flashes of elegance in downtown come from hollow buildings: several-story parking buildings scattered throughout the city, which, rid of facade design other than the stacking of slabs and the placing of columns, manage to convey powerfully through architecture some of the strongest qualities of American cities: the omnipresent grid; and the car, the other inhabitant of the cities that also needs a house. In this case, beautiful houses.
