Pickle

HAMBURG, GERMANY, 1989

We were doing some work in Hamburg and decided to quickly imagine a couple of skyscrapers there. Not much to be said about them save that the Pickle was designed well before the London gherkin and that it is lifted up to acknowledge the double-ended essence of a cucumber. The Fiddlehead suggests an idea about a close-packed multiplicity of slender towers in a single “building”.

Higher vertebrates, being mobile, acquire their directional characteristic from the most efficient production of forward motion. Sense organs are generally deployed to facilitate this mobility. These houses, however, are only symbolically directional: the ocular advantage is not necessarily pegged to what seems to be the axis of motion, rather to the long sides of the object, which simply provide greater area for fenestration and view.

Credits: Michael Sorkin