The Humana Building, Michael Graves’s Postmodern Gem Reconsidered
04/08/2012 Chicago Tribune By Blair Kamin

“Much has happened to the art of skyscraper design in the 30 years since architect Michael Graves won the design competition that led to the construction of the quintessentially postmodern Humana Building here, not the least of which is that postmodernism itself fell into disrepute.

Critics savaged the style, which reacted against the austerity of modernist steel and glass boxes, for producing a pastiche of historical references — a column tacked on here, a pediment there. Architects like Frank Gehry have since moved in a new direction, using the computer to conjure sleek sculptural forms that would have been unthinkable three decades ago.

But postmodernism deserves a more sophisticated reappraisal, one that carefully separates its masterpieces from its mediocrities and clarifies its contributions to the long-term arc of design. That’s the conclusion I reached after a recent tour of the Humana Building. While the building has undeniable flaws, they are easily outweighed by its attributes, which have only grown stronger with time.

To put this 27-story office headquarters — originally built for $60 million — into perspective, it is helpful to recall the state of architecture in the early 1980s, when postmodernism was at the height of its influence and architects were in full revolt against the abstract forms of commercial modernism.

Philip Johnson had shocked the architecture world in 1978 when he released the design for the AT&T Building (now Sony Tower) in Manhattan, which resembled a Chippendale highboy. In 1983, New York architects Kohn Pedersen Fox took the epicenter of the glass box, Chicago, by storm with their 333 W. Wacker Drive tower and its elegantly curving wall of green glass along the Chicago River.

Graves, a relatively obscure architect and teacher at Princeton University, was vaulted to stardom in 1980 when he won an international competition for the Portland Public Service Building, a highly decorated box whose design would be seriously compromised by a tight budget. In Humana, a booming hospital company that is now a health insurance provider, he found a client whose ambitions — and resources — were an ideal match for his philosophy of contextual design, which called for buildings to reflect their urban surroundings…..”
and so it continues…

As a segregated track system would be exponentially more expensive, the DomPost is simply highlighting this fact given Wellington has narrow streets and existing congestion corridors.

In this context – why are LTR systems such as Edmontons being used for cost comparison purposes when their system design, topography and urban density don’t have anything in common with Wellington. BTW – great google views of this system.