Contextual Glass

In addition to implementing a radically new frameless curtain wall, the Willis Building introduced a novel way for a high-tech glass building to be contextual. The building was shaped by context in ways that defy conventional historic references. The faceted glass panels result in fractured reflections of the surrounding cityscape; the buildings across the streets, ranging from Gothic to Brutalist, are presented as distorted reflections continuously recomposed as the viewers walk along the building (Figure 3.4). The building’s instrumentality operates much like the concave mirrors one finds at street corners, alerting pedestrians of the cars and busses approaching around the corner. The dark,

FIGURE 3.4 The faceted glass panels depict the surrounding buildings as an assembly of fractured reflections.

Courtesy of Norman Foster Foundation (1971—1975).

transparent glass of the Willis Building reflects back to the city the street that shaped it; the glass panels depict the surrounding buildings like clusters of partially assembled jigsaw puzzles.

The ways in which the Willis Building’s façade confounds the viewers are similar to those observed in the works by Light and Space artists of the 1960s, including James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Dan Graham. In their work, materials’ edges and joints are detailed to dissolve. In Turrell’s Skyspace installations, the edges of the ceiling aperture that frame the sky are tapered so that the edges appear as thin as a sheet of paper. In Irwin’s gossamer scrim walls, the material edges appear to dissolve with light, blurring the boundaries between material and space. Dan Graham’s pavilions often comprise steel frames, mirrors, and glass with reflective coating. As viewers move around the space, they voyeuristically see themselves seeing, while watching others do the same. Viewers’ perception of the real versus the virtual images becomes blurred in Graham’s constructs. Similar to these artists’ work, at the Willis Building the boundaries between reflected sky and the actual sky become blurred, particularly seamlessly at twilight when the glass appears to merge with the sky (Figure 3.5). This blurring is underscored by reflections of itself mirrored, along with buildings across the street, on the building’s façade; the Willis

FIGURE 3.5 At twilight, the glass appears to merge with the sky.

Photograph: Author (2019).

Building not only simply mirrors but also dissolves and reassembles itself and the surrounding landscape.

Boston’s John Hancock Tower, designed by Henry Cobb of I. M. Pei and Partners and completed one year later than the Willis Building in 1976, offers a comparison to the Willis Building. Its form was shaped by its location on Copley Square and its adjacency to H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church. It takes, on the one hand, a dissimilar approach to context by erecting a 62-floor “notched rhomboid” glass tower in a rectangular site and, on the other, a similar approach to the Willis Building in being both silent and assertive. Cobb refers to the stance of the Hancock Tower as a form of poetry and silence:

The building’s restraint to the point of muteness, its refusal to reveal anything other than its obsession with its urban context, is surely its greatest strength but also its ultimate limitation as a work of architecture. Despite the forcefulness of its gesture, the tower remains virtually speechless, and this resolute self-denial is, in the end, both its triumph and its tragedy.¹¹’

Public opposition towards the Willis Building was mild compared to the shock and horror that the Hancock Tower elicited. However, the Willis Building, in some ways, shares the muteness of the Hancock Tower. The reflective, dark gray façade that reveals very little of the interior office appears forbidding. Its front doors located on the side opposite the face with the highest traffic, make the main entrance difficult for visitors to locate. With no entrance canopy, setback, or a change in material to signify an invitation, the revolving glass doors are mute (Figure 3.6). Furthermore, despite the dynamic reflections of the neighboring buildings activating the façade, the glass panels are sealed tightly with silicone, with no operable windows or balconies indicating human scale. The building is restrained, and does not reveal employee interactions or expressions in the ways of, for instance, Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer.

Nonetheless, the Willis Building has been celebrated for its novel correlation to the existing townscape. Reyner Banham, in his 1977 essay “Grass above, Glass around,” champions the Willis Building for attaining contextualism of the Townscape movement advocated by Gordon Cullen, an influential British urban designer. Cullen authored Townscape (1961), a book characterized by his picturesque perspective sketches, primarily of vernacular buildings from the

FIGURE 3.6 With no entrance canopy, setback, or a change in material to signify an invitation, the three revolving glass doors on the northwest façade facing Princes Street appear mute.

winding streets, ports, and town squares of medieval English cities. He wrote, “bring buildings together and collectively they can give visual pleasure which one cannot give separately.”¹¹ Banham contends that the Willis Building, with unapologetically modern language and materials, engenders the picturesque qualities that Cullen advocated. Banham writes the Willis Building possesses “exactly the kinds of visual effects — surprises, truncation, concealment, confrontation — for which Toumscape always campaigned,” ~ but using an architectural language of high-tech glass that contrasts the brick piazzas, stone arcades, and bell towers in Toumscape.