Hrag Vartanian

Critic, Curator, Editor-in-chief and co-founder, Hyperallergic

Critic, Curator, Editor-in-chief and co-founder, Hyperallergic

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Burn, Baby Burn! (Koolhaas’ Towering Inferno in Beijing)

February 10, 2009 by hv

CHINA-FIRE/

There’s something epochal about this blaze. And it reminds me of the 1974 Hollywood classic, The Towering Inferno, that great pop culture flick that inadvertently represented the demise of high modernism. In the film, a massive skyscraper is built in San Francisco without the safety precautions the architect provided to the builder.

At 130 stories, the fictional tower would still be considered one of the tallest buildings in the world. It’s placement in San Francisco highlighted the lunacy of the endeavor since an earthquake zone isn’t the best location for such a phallic structure.

skylinescan-small

The film was based on two novels that were inspired by the building of the World Trade Center (The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, and The Tower by Richard Martin Stern) and it encapsulates the mounting questions about the value and success of the “modernist project.”

draw1

And here’s the original movie trailer:

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Filed Under: architecture, cinema, pop culture

Comments

  1. robbie says

    February 10, 2009 at 11:52 am

    “i’ll be back with the whole fire department.” how many times have i said that?

  2. Oriane Stender says

    February 10, 2009 at 2:20 pm

    I watched a bit of the filming of The Towering Inferno when I was a kid. I’ve never understood the desire to watch disaster movies (there have always been enough real disasters that the staged ones didn’t seem like escape or fantasy, but just reminders of the real thing) but movies sets are another story; they’re always fun. Celebrity sighting that day: Steve McQueen.

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