Glass Box Trends

With today's announcement of MahaNakhon, a 77-story tower in Bangkok designed by OMA partner Ole Scheeren, the internet will be awash in images of the pixelated glass tower. The design departs from a fairly typical glass box, eroding, carving and shifting the Modernist ideal into something iconic yet precarious. It is immediately reminiscent of Herzog & de Meuron's design for 56 Leonard in Manhattan, found on the cover of eVolo's first issue.


[L: MahaNakhon by OMA | R: 56 Leonard by Herzog & de Meuron]

Each design has the same starting point -- the Modernist glass box -- but each design modifies it in different ways. Herzog & de Meuron shift the stacked floors to create terraces and overhangs, what they call "houses stacked in the sky." The base and top leave no traces of the platonic origins, but the middle section's regularity hints at the design's precursors. Likewise the MahaNakhon tower starts with the regular but modifies it to create areas with terraces and overhangs. These areas wrap the building in a spiral manner, in effect creating a supergraphic on the skyline. Compared to 56 Leonard it is more pleasing at that scale, even though it brings to mind erosion and destruction. But at the scale of about ten floors the two projects look like twins:


[L: MahaNakhon by OMA | R: 56 Leonard by Herzog & de Meuron]

So do these two designs by two of the most popular and prolific firms in the world today signal a trend? Is this the end of torqued, möbius and pickle towers? Will architects have a brief fling with shifting glass boxes before they move onto to the next high-rise transformation? I think the expense of these designs (more facade area as well as additional insulation and weatherproofing required on the terraces and soffits) makes them suitable only for super-rich condos and therefore short-lived. Additionally the formalism of these two designs -- messy in NYC and a one-liner in Bangkok -- points to a short shelf life for this trend.