At some point, I’m going to feel guilty about dissecting this building, but I’m not there yet. I see it every day and it bothers me.
The first-floor windows, as I’ve discussed before, have fake flat-arch window heads that are problematic. The picture above extends up a bit from the one I used last time, to show the second-floor window heads. They are not fake flat-arches, and somehow that feels worse. This is a concrete-frame building, and the walls are non-structural. The masonry veneer is supported by the frame, most likely by back-up (either metal studs or concrete block) sitting on the edges of the floor slabs. No arches or other lintel details are actually needed in the stone veneer. So the second floor looks vaguely like something impossible – large stones set in running courses above an opening – but that’s fine since it’s modern structure.
My first problem is consistency: there is none. The second floor has the modern lintel-less, arch-less appearance while the first floor has the fake flat arches. The first floor windows are set back while the second floor windows are not. Even their window frames are painted different colors. The stone coursing between the windows doesn’t match the coursing above the second floor. These two windows should, architecturally, be similar, but they’re not and for no apparent reason.
My second problem is that I’m afraid I know the reason for the first problem. Post-modernism was some twenty years old when this building was designed, and had made the leap from individual building-statements to mainstream architectural design. It’s possible that the detailing that shows off the thinness of the stone, that the discrepancies between detailing of the two floors, that the discrepancies between the detailing of the stone coursing and actual masonry practice are all intentional, to point out that this is veneer rather than real stone. If that’s true, it’s overly clever.
