Sharing shoulders: the latest Trump International Tower & Hotel and the stately Wrigley Building

A few days ago, I learned a new fact about the skyscrapers along the Chicago River downtown. Many of the architectural landmarks have been designed to relate to the river and their neighboring buildings. Roof lines of older and shorted buildings are picked up by the mid-section of their tall neighbors; curved green glass panels wrap softly around a convex facade that follows the river bends. To the uninitiated, this silent conversation lends an air of visual harmony.

Continuity and context probably aren’t news to anyone who has been to architecture school, but this led me to wonder if the products in our homes share a similar visual harmony. Could aesthetics be designed in relation to that of existing and owned products? A comparable example might be the Apple-esque culture with its endless stream of snow-white auxiliary products, but with a self-adjusting mechanism from multiple inputs rather than a direction driven by a single product.