Macy's (former Hecht's), Tysons Corner Center, McLean, Virginia. Loading area. (Neil Strawbridge)
Macy's (former Hecht's), Tysons Corner Center, McLean, Virginia. Exterior entrance. (Neil Strawbridge)Previously on LiveMalls
Macy's (former Hecht's), Tysons Corner Center
I really like that cool, clean look of the Tysons store - hardly would you know it's not sitting in a pristine meadow!
ReplyDeleteThose overhangs are quite gaudy. The building itself looks like an engineering school at some polytechnic university in India.
ReplyDeleteTodd: I like these shots, too. It's hard to appreciate the beauty of this place when you're looking at it from the parking deck (exception noted below), but at ground level, it looks really good.
ReplyDeleteThe one exception to the parking deck maxim is when you're seeing it from the top of the deck. The fluting on the cornice is really cool up close.
Nitek: It may not be your taste, but this is actually a really good example of what department stores looked like in the late '60s. Hecht's stores were always restrained and architecturally interesting, if not always beautiful, and this is no exception.
I like the beauty of it too. You have to have some awesome appreciation for modern tastes to like buildings like these.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy to discard Modernism because so much of its best work is overshadowed by the bad examples, but the designers of that era were onto something. It didn't replace traditional design elements, but it made them more efficient and easier to reproduce (and also created the historic preservation movement by accident)
ReplyDeleteTrue. But what makes me so angry is that modernism isn't look upon as good enough. We are losing so many of these structures every single day because some present day thinkers think of some (not all) examples as cheap, too small, gaudy or ugly. That's what kills me.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what will stop the destruction, but I hope that sites like ours will help establish the legitimacy of Modernism as beautiful design.
ReplyDeleteOne could only hope.
ReplyDeleteBut first before anything can happen people need to see modernism for the beauty that it is and not have this attitude that it is not old enough to preserve yet or that it is too ugly to preserve.
Lets hope that that happens soon. In a way, it's already started on the high end with a lot of attention being paid to Modern design.
ReplyDelete