Where's the U.S. bank building?
I took an American architecture class in college where we looked at some iconic buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and others. The illustrations and photos in the class did not often show how the average person saw the buildings; what the Seagrams building in NYC, for example, looked like as you exited from the 51st Street Lexington avenue subway station.
A building can be framed in a unusual way by our vantage point, other objects, or the time of day. But the building is still important to us; even from a distance or half-hidden, it helps lift (or depress) our spirit and define our place.
Christopher Colby
2010