Cira Center conference room ceiling

PITCHES in ceiling make all the difference. The entire workspace and meeting floor at the Cira Center in Philadelphia are very well designed making my experience of the hours I have spent in there listening to speakers really nice. There is a glamour to being there.
Cesar Pelli (and a host of staff, I'm sure) was the architect/designer.

Philadelphia and the Schuykill River water front.

It's going to be hard for Philadelphia to turn the Schuylkill river into a place to enjoy. The trains and I-76 make hard fences to jump. At one time the river for us was just another freeway of sorts; more like the freeway and rail lines we curse than like the park we'd like it to be now.

San Francisco has an amazing connection to the Bay but that is only because of two disasters. One is the collapse of trade economy which destroyed the port and the other was the earthquake that destroyed the Embarcadero Freeway. Now SF has a clean shot at the Bay. There's not much here for Philly to learn from unless it's to wait and turn industrial collapse and natural disaster to good use.
What to do....?

What skyscrapers look like from skyscrapers

 

Modernism in the minds of developers and architects of office towers = uniformity and tediousness. This isn't whining. It's a fact. There's no joy in looking out their window for anyone with an office on THIS side of 1500 Market Street in Philadelphia.

It is the people with the offices on the other side of this floor, those who face the funky glorious mess of City Hall's facade, who feel like the have something to look at. Here is THAT view from just down the hall:

Three Little Buildings

131 S. 18th, Philadelphia is in the details.

Lovely.

Serpents at Wayne Junction SEPTA Station

Oh so nice.

SEPTA'S poor beat up Wayne Junction Station must have been something else at one time.... These serpents most likely are the dolphins that belong to Benjamin Franklin's coat of arms. They show up all over the city. Penn's shield, or coat of arms, is a composite of Franklin's dolphins and Penn's three plates.

[UPDATE] They are fixing up this station.

Philly Iron

Nice old Philadelphia house on Allen Ln in Mt. Airy

Philly: You funky old city

Facades and Color

Over and over, the accidental prototyping of color on buildings by vapor barriers that have yet to be sheathed prove to me that their blues and yellows are far more human to me than the taupes, greys and sands that cover them in the end.

Buildings should be engaging...

...it's hard to know how to engage a sheet of glass.