An Unfortunate Comparison

I’m not a big fan of mid-twentieth-century modernism, and I still agree that Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City is remarkable architecture.

From the north:

From the south:

There’s just one little detail that got stuck in my head that partially ruins looking at it for me. Every high-rise has some mechanical equipment that has to go on the top of the building – at the bare minimum, the elevator overrun – and that can be hidden in various ways. The minimalist way to hide it is to construct a mechanical penthouse just big enough to house it. If you’re designing a round building, I guess it makes sense to make that penthouse round as well, as you can see in my pictures.

It reminds me of the button on the top of a joystick.

The first time I noticed this on is a building in Troy, New York, that I first saw when I was 16. That round apartment house is much less architecturally interesting but was constructed at the same time. Something was in the air in the mid-1960s.