A masterpiece from the minds of mediocrities

This Instagram image of a cable-suspended floating ramp took me by surprise – not so much for the design, but for the designers, who were so known for modernist mediocrity in architecture that it was hard to believe they could come up with something as ingenious as this. 

They happened to be Charles Luckman, notorious for ruining Boston's cityscape with the Prudential Tower in 1964, and William R. Pereira, for doing the same to San Francisco's skyline with the Transamerica Pyramid in 1972.

Completed before both of those skyscraper disasters, this sculpturally inspired spiral ramp floating over a dark reflecting pool from its forest of cables suspended from the ceiling was designed for the Convair Astronautics Plant in San Diego, California, in 1958, as a symbol of the aerospace industry's pursuit of weightlessness in space.

Look at that, and look at these: The sculptural flourish and floating buoyancy of the ramp is replaced by the immutably bland boxiness of the Prudential Tower (left) and the triangular elongation of the Transamerica Pyramid (right), both showing total disregard for the historic neighborhoods and skylines they "came from another planet" to settle into, both serving merely to promote their respective life insurance companies with eye-catching iconography they'll be remembered for, with no attempt to blend with their cities' traditions.

By contrast to the superficial symbolism of the towers, the ramp richly symbolizes its company's space-travel goals by creating a sculptural floating-in-air impression in the lobby, even inviting visitors to partake of the show by walking up and down the ramp and feeling themselves virtually weightless, as opposed to taking elevators up the towers to get bird's-eye views of the cities.

To be continued...

Sources:

"Cable suspended ramps/stairs," Eng-Tips.com Engineering Forums, November 2, 2018, https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/cable-suspended-ramps-stairs.445924/

"Defying gravity," Archinerds, Instagram, October 29, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DfFh--ekXfI/?obrf=NGw4cDF1aHh5NWRi

"Prudential Center (Boston)," Wikipedia,  last edited on 30 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_Center_(Boston)

"Transamerica Pyramid," Wikipedia,  last edited on 16 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Pyramid