Take to your heels

摘要

It's hard to imagine Mies van der Rohe in sneakers. He created big, black, shiny office towers for men - like himself - wearing big, black, shiny shoes. If there's any geist in a zeit at all, it seems to show up in an uncanny connection between footwear and architecture. You can see this in the relationship of pointy medieval shoes to pointed gothic architecture; Birkenstock sandals to the mellow, woodsy, 60s forms of Sea Ranch; R M Williams elastic-sided work boots to Glenn Murcutt's minimalist bush houses; and blobby Air Jordans - already retro by the time architects caught up - with the blobby buildings of the early 00s. When the new design for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site was recently unveiled, the shoe linkage was obvious; we were seeing the upturned heel of a Manolo Blahnik. It looked as if David Childs and Daniel Libeskind had found the pattern beside the bed of one of those Sex and the City girls.