To be terracotta-colored

The glimmering silver building in this elegant model of downtown Philadelphia is a building that is taller than the Empire State Building and Sears Tower, with a garden hanging 470 feet above street level and a spire that tops the building out at 1,500 feet.

This is the American Commerce Center, and it doesn’t exist yet. But there was a time when the 975-foot Comcast Center (currently the tallest building in Philly) was just a silver-colored dream, too. Now, as you can see above (refresh this page if you can’t see it) Comcast is just one of the terracotta-colored skyscrapers in the model.

The plans for this behemoth tower have just come out into the public, but I can already feel a great sense of excitement and pride in my non permanent home base. The first thing I thought when I looked at it was, of course, “early Freedom Tower design.” But I don’t really care. I like the design, and the garden thing is unique to this design. It’s simple, elegant, and projects power and optimism in the future – just what a city with something of an inferiority complex needs.

And this isn’t being built atop of Ground Zero – it’s being built atop a boring-ass parking lot in the heart of the city. It’s not even a garage, it’s a friggin’ lot, and it’s the perfect place to set up a new member of the skyline.

The real challenge is to complete this in it’s 1,500-foot final form (if that is it’s final form) before Freedom Tower or the Chicago Spire, to make the ACC the tallest skyscraper in the whole U S of A. How’s that for superior? More likely than not, however, that challenge will not quite be met. After all, it is just a proposal, right now.

To be honest, one of the main reasons I moved to Philly was the architecture – namely, the huge and expanding skyline. I’m glad to see that the reshaping of a once-dull-as-toast skyline is proceeding apace.