Rainier Tower in Seattle by architect Minoru Yamasaki (1977)/// Photograph by Léopold Lambert (May 2014)

Regular readers of The Funambulist will have noticed that I have been often referring to the term fortress in order to describe pieces of architecture I recently encountered. This word refers to the defensive qualities that each of these architectures presents through its physicality in the way it “organizes bodies in space” (that is still my definition for architecture). However, it does not address the political agenda that is enacted through these defensive characteristics. What I have been calling “proletarian fortresses” in the last few years to describe Burail (Chandigarh), Rue Eugene Sue’s Haussmannian social housings (Paris), the Kowloon Walled City (Hong Kong) or the Torre David (Caracas) are the counterpoints to other fortresses, more deliberate and optimal, that capitalist-ideological logic construct everywhere. Whether we refer to the U.S./Mexico border wall, the wall that Israel built in the West Bank, the current Western embassies, this building encountered in San Francisco that acts a paradigm of the architecture of gentrification, the militarized public space of downtown Oakland, or the building that I want to describe in this article, they all impose the social violence of filtration between bodies who have access to both sides of their walls and bodies on whom the violence of architecture is fully operating.

The Rainier Tower in Seattle was designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the 1970s, only a few years after New York’s World Trade Center that did not wait for 2001 to embody the totem of American capitalist ideology. It was built for the Rainier National Bank for its headquarters. The Rainier Tower is particularly striking for its twelve first floors splaying from the top down into a fully opaque brutal concrete base (see photographs below). Such an engineering prowess associated to a radical aesthetics certainly put the first visitor (that I was two weeks ago) in awe. The well-known aesthetics of the office tower is recognizable for the floors above the 12th floor of the building, thus reinforcing the radicality of the basis in its contrast. To some degree, we might want to think of this tower as the representation of the capitalist ideological architecture: a transparent aspect for the inaccessible mirage and a defensive bunker for what should be its interactive base...Continue Reading

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