I once worked on a project where the company’s website was so complex and detailed and, frankly, byzantine, that by the time we first visited the company’s actual office I wondered where the skyscraper was hiding. You’d never know from the company’s massive online presence that it was really just a few dozen people working on the top floor of a two-floor building. Sometimes such confusion is willful, an act of strategic dissimulation, a game of tactical artifice. Sometimes it’s a matter of putting on airs. Often it’s just bad planning. Either way, the company came to mind when I wandered by this extensive doorbell situated at the entryway of a modest two-story apartment building. The verticality of the form brought to mind soda cans that have the silhouette of a glass bottle drawn on them, as well as depictions of the very condensation that the can was designed to diminish. Of course, this doorbell grid isn’t really a skeuomorph, per se. It’s more of an aspiration. The architecture curator at a museum once described the faux lofts being built in San Francisco as “townhouses in drag.” This doorbell is playing its own sort of low-budget dress-up. It’s skyscraper cosplay.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.