When Joe posted a panoramic photo of the view from atop Six North Michigan over the weekend, reader Dan Winne responded that, it’s “crazy how Aqua is perfectly hidden by AON.” Indeed, doing a disappearing act with an 82-story tower is no small feat, but we’ve noticed that from many angles in the Loop, Aqua is perfectly hidden.
In a Chicago Public Radio story that aired this morning, architect Jeanne Gang from Studio Gang Architects addressed how the architecture of the building attempts to negotiate its position in the shadow of Aon.
See how it’s kind of buried in between all these other buildings? So we thought if we just bump out this edge of the building here, we might be able to see around the corner, so it’s really a three-dimensional game.
Gang also discussed how new tools and materials are opening the door to new possibilities for Chicago architects:
Things you couldn’t do before maybe because you were forced into repetition from construction, that’s where we’ve really been liberated. I love Marina towers, but they are the way they are because they needed to be repetitious. We can break away from that.