Towers in the City

Please note: this is an out of print and rare book, with some marks on the page edges, but otherwise in good condition. 

Harry Seidler & Associates: Towers in the City looks at eight towers, elegant examples of this much criticised genre, with a combination of colour and monochrome full page photographs and building plan diagrams and illustrations. The buildings covered in this book are; Hong Kong Club, Riverside Centre, Grosvenor Place Development, Capita Centre, Shell House, Landmark Tower, Australia Square and MLC Centre.

Despite its detractors the tall building has an essential role to play in the contemporary city, the means by which it reaches the ground and its relationship with its immediate surrounding is a subject of continuing debate to which these buildings make a vital contribution.

Looking at the towers it is difficult to date them or to place them in any sort of chronological order. One might have thought that the rectangular City Mutual Building predated say, the Hong Kong Club with its almost baroque plan, but one would be wrong. 

This is at first curious, since Seidler is a believer in the idea that buildings should reflect the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist. But on reflection it becomes clear that while his buildings reflect the changing technology of building and put into concrete form the characteristics of the corporations they house, there is substantial geist of this particular zeit that Seidler purposefully ignores and rejects, but with the tide of Post Modernism waning and the growing reassessment of the Modernist view, Seidler will stand out as one who ignored the Sirens of Stylism and, Odysseus-like, held his course. 

Edizioni Tecno
Published 1988
Hardback
52 Pages
302mm x 214mm
ISBN 073163439