This Guy Gets It!

I came across a really cool blog post this morning by a guy who was visiting New York. I totally "get" what he says about the effect that buildings can have, not only on a skyline or a city-scape, but on the whole vibe of a city. That's what makes buildings so cool--not only are they beautiful to look at, but they give everything around them an energy and a context.

I wish I could write as well as this guy! Here's what he had to say:

"What gives Manhattan its special character is found at the macro-level,
the mountain landscape created by its buildings – plunge down Broadway from
Columbus Circle down toward Times Square. The skyscrapers are densely textured and enormously deep. The older buildings and the newer buildings have
back-layering of their stories – they look more than anything else on the East
Coast or, really, east of the Rockies, like the glaciated crags of the Sierra
Nevada. Despite a spurt of pure modernism, Manhattan skyscrapers are not merely monolithic rectangular prisms stood on end. They taper back as they gain in height, often dramatically so, and the effect of narrowing the top floors
relative to a building's footprint on the ground floor is to make the buildings
feel as though they were leaping upwards, creating a sense of grandeur that is
very much akin to the mountains of the West."

(The links in the above quote are my insertions, not his, fyi...)

Manhattan is the eastern Sierra Nevada of the East Coast [Kenneth Anderson's blog]