Superstar? Superstar Archi-Clown, Maybe

So Santiago Calatrava swaggered into town Monday, waving his big dick of a skyscraper in the faces of the drooling Chicago media, and they eagerly lined up to fellate him. Stories about Calatrava’s soaring, twisting tower appeared in both the Sun-Times and the Tribune on Tuesday, and both papers referred to the Spanish architect as a “superstar.”

Fuck that. Calatrava’s grotesque tower would mar Chicago’s skyline, but more importantly it would be a giant ass pimple on the lakeshore. His big “innovation” is rotating each successive floor two degrees clockwise from the floor below it, thus giving the building the twisting appearance. In one story, Calatrava tried to say the design was meant to evoke the first wisp of smoke from the first fire lit by natives along the lakeshore. Whatever. It’s an overly narrow, overly tall building that—at 2,000-plus feet tall—is too tall for the Streeterville neighborhood in which it will be built.

I doubt the city will allow it, but the slobbering knob job both the Sun-Times and the Tribune gave the initial design is as good a reminder as any that newspaper architecture writers and critics are writers and critics—not planners or architects—for a reason: often, they have little taste and no sense of sustainable, practical and scalable development.