click photo for full-size image
photo by Donald Kinney
Back in the late '60's and early '70's most everybody thought San Francisco's Planning Commission was nuts for allowing such an unusual building, but I think by now most everybody has come around to actually love the shape of the building, and especially what it does for the San Francisco skyline.
So why is the building (853 feet) so tall? Because Transamerica wanted it to be taller than their competitor at 555 California Street, even though that building is built on considerably higher ground. The Transamerica Corportation is no longer located in the building...
And here is something you may not have heard about:
The building is considered to have been the intended target of a foiled terrorist attack, involving the hijacking of airplanes as part of Oplan Bojinka, which was foiled in 1995. Read more about the Transamerica Building at: Wikipedia
CLICK to visit my Daily-Duo.
CLICK to visit KittyBLOG -- the daily doings of my cat.
announcing my newly (re)re-designed collection:
CLICK for what I call my BIG site
Your comments are invited and welcome.
5 comments:
Great sky line! Nice sky watch too :)
I love- as the tile of the post puts it- all the lovely geometric shapes you got into the picture. Something about it is just very striking. :)
Terrific angles Don. The TransAmerica building gives a lot of character to the skyline I think.
San Francisico has so many lovely shapes.
Oh, I didn't know about the terrorist attack in '95. But maybe that explains why we used to be able to go up, and then came the time where you could only manipulate the cameras from the lobby (that was actually pretty cool, they have cameras up there and you could "move" them remotely, and watch the view on the consoles). Then, came 9/11 and now I'm not sure if they allow anybody at all in the building unless you have business with one of the tenants? Security in all the buildings of the FD has become tighter since 9/11.
By the way, that building on the left looks a little bit like a cheese grater ;)
Post a Comment