Concreteness

So I think I've figured out my frustrations with contemporary aesthetics: I've been living in NYC, and specifically working in Midtown, which is predominated by modernist buildings. And frankly, I'm kind of sick of being surrounded by a linear forest of steel and glass. I've kind of fallen for the Grace building, which I pass by on my walk between work and the subway [it's 42nd across from Bryant Park], which was built in the 70's, just after the Modernist era, but has a gentle arc to its façade, as if the entire structure were made of a viscous medium slowly spilling down. It also has this really attractive pale color, and the word "GRACE" appears enigmatically above the Avenue of the Americas entrance. I was really captivated by the "GRACE" until I did some Googling and found out that it is the name of the chemical company that originally occupied the building. I prefer my ignorance when I thought it was some sort of heavenly gate in the middle of all of these ugly financial megacenters [the buildings surrounding it house companies like Verizon, (soon-to-be) Bank of America, and the Wall Street Journal, which, ironically, is nowhere near Wall Street.]

While at this point, it's probably redundant (and not to mention ridiculous) to walk around shouting, "Ugly!" at all the gross skyscrapers [*cough* Verizon], I think I've made some progress. Damn straight lines. Having found one demonstrated solution to my proposed merger of modernism and biomorphism [constructing with both lines and arc], I have a concrete (no pun intended) example to provide.

--thoughts interrupted... to be continued--