Mystery: The Headless Tower

I came across this image in the paper Integrating Mass Customization With Prefabricated Housing [HUANG 2006, with picture credit to ARIEFF 2002] and at first wondered whether this had been taken before the top of the capsule tower had been completed, or perhaps that some odd combination of lens and viewing angle had obscured it. However, on closer inspection the window shades are fitted (which happened after the towers were completed) and the photo is otherwise similar to images that do show the tops of the towers. Zooming in, you can see where the image has been rather clumsily edited. Perhaps the author mistook the tops of the towers for a background building? On top of this, the image doesn’t appear in ARIEFF 2002 as credited.

  1. HUANG 2006 “Integrating Mass Customization With Prefabricated Housing“, Joseph C H Huang, Robert J Krawczyk, Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture
  2. ARIEFF 2002 “Prefab“, Allison Arieff, Bryan Burkhart, May 2002, ISBN 978-1586851323