Beauty, novel and tragedy of the best skyscraper in New York

by time news

2023-05-27 23:14:12

Updated

  • Arabia Saud An impulse for the tower of a kilometer
  • white towers From decadence to la dolce vita

Throughout the crystal storm, the first novel by the architect Pedro Torrijos (Ediciones B), there are 26 quotes from William Shakespeare that are like secret clues to understand the book. What is Shakespeare’s theater but a way of portray men’s longings for greatness, first as ridiculous and then as compassionate? That is also what The Crystal Storm is all about. Note that all the quotes are from Shakespeare’s tragedies, not comedies: Lear, The

storm, Othello, The Merchant of Venice

y

Hamlet

clarifies Torrijos. And of

Hamlet

only one line comes out: Bye, bye, remember me.

Goodbye, goodbye, remember me is what Hugh Stubbins and William LeMessurier, the failed heroes of

the crystal storm

after having slipped

from glory to tragedy

. Torrijos’s characters are the architect and the engineer, both real, who designed and built in the 1970s the most sensational building in New York of its time, the

Citicorp Center

. His case, well documented, is studied in all the schools of Architecture in the world.

What was heroic and tragic about that project? Your starting hypothesis.

The site chosen was the neighbor of the traditional Citicorp headquarters on 53rd Street in Manhattan.

and was occupied by an impoverished but proud Lutheran church. His congregation refused to give up his house, not even for all the gold in the world, but they agreed to sell their air rights to their banker neighbors, who longed for that property to install their new power plant. Stubbins and LeMessurier were commissioned to build a floorless skyscraper there.

how is that? Air rights are ownership of the air above a building.

Their owner sells them and agrees not to build up

. And the neighbor buys them to be able to put windows in the dividing wall without any future work going to blind them. That is normal, what has been done in Manhattan since the 19th century. In the case of Citicorp, the rights were used to mount one building on top of the other. CitiCorp did not build its tower on the floor of the church but on its air. It was the first time that a building was mounted on top of the other. After it has been done a few times, it is relatively frequent.

Stubbins and, above all, LeMessurier act as

undisputed heroes

in the first half of the book: they achieve the impossible, building a 279-meter tower on an empty 30-meter-high podium, with an impossible foundation, based on four off-center cores. They also did it in the New York of the 70s, impoverished and violent (and to which Torrijos’s characters are

olymically indifferent

), and with efficiency criteria unimaginable until then. They invented the mass damper, which was a great idea and is used in many towers today: the idea is that since the wind is only going to put stress on the building sometimes, having a structure that protects it permanently is

unnecessary waste of energy

. LeMessurier invented a structure that turned on and off, that was only there when it was needed.

But in the greatness of the two heroes was their condemnation: the Citicorp massif had an Achilles heel,

a conceptual crack

that could lead to its collapse on any stormy day. Bottom line: Engineers prepared their tower to withstand headwinds, but

they did not think of the diagonal winds

. The Glass Storm tells the story of the discovery of that error and the journey of Stubbins and LeMessurier from glory to infamy. And, at the end, he puts a very Shakespearean storm on them too so they try to redeem themselves.

Actually, more than an expensive sin, what happened in the Citicorp case was

a succession of calamities, of errors that were falling like dominoes

. The wind tests were carried out for frontal gales, but that was what the norm required and no one had done anything else before, explains Torrijos.

In his novel there is another type of hero, rather a heroine: Diane Hartley, an engineering student, discovered the miscalculation and warned,

despite his insecurity

, of the disaster that awaited the tower. And Jennifer Longo, an engineer on LeMessurier’s team, was the first person to hear Hartley’s warning and the one who set about saving the building. Hartley is a real person; Longo, a fiction, a mixture between two people who had a role in the real history of Citicorp.

This is a pure novel based on a true story, not fictionalized non-fiction or a popular book.

It’s a

thriller

because the

thriller

It’s what I believe in and Aaron Sorkin is my god.

says Torrijos. Even in the real characters, their development is that of a novel. From LeMessurier there is documentation and interviews, we know that he liked to see himself as a hero and listen to Wagner. But I put a lot of myself into his character. At first I did it unconsciously and then consciously.

There is a lot in him of what I was until 13 years ago because something similar happened to me

… on another scale. I had a motto: ‘Pedro Torrijos is never wrong’. And he said it like that, in the third person.

And he continues: Then I was wrong. It wasn’t that bad. Or it was, I don’t know, it depends on the person. For me it was a serious trauma. I entered a difficult period, with a

obsessive disorder

that I learned to control with therapy and pharmacology. Actually, I started writing this book at that time.

Torrijos is perhaps the greatest disseminator of architecture in Spain in his generation, so the temptation is to see this novel as

an extension of that work as a cultural commentator

. Shakespeare’s quotes undo that misunderstanding:

the crystal storm

He does not speak of shapes, masses, structures or materials. He talks about human nature with its ins and outs.

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