Citicorp center's secret savior! or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Citicorp engineering crisis of 1978

The 59-story mess of hubris at right is the imposing home of Citigroup. Of course, in 1978, that financial services and banking conglomerate was still called Citicorp, this story taking place twenty years before Citibank's huge and dubious merger with the Traveler’s Group.

Anyway, David Rockefeller's midtown Manhattan tower of doom is unique for being perched on four 120-foot columns set at the center of the sides of the lot. This was a concession to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, which was demolished on the condition that it would be replaced at the same corner of the site where the old church had stood. So designer William LeMessurier decided to rest Citibank's corporate monolith on enormous columns. The street-level effect is absolutely fucking terrifying:

If you’re wondering how this stack of suck doesn’t just fall down in high winds, you’re not alone. It was rushed to completion, and the tower's design was marred by cost-cutting measures, including using bolts instead of welding joints to secure the superstructure. Ridiculously, this line-item savings failed to account for ‘quartering’ winds, tricky gusts that hit buildings at a 45 degree angle. But who cares? After all, they were just building a huge skyscraper on stilts. What's the worst that could happen?

Weeks after Citicorp Center's grand opening, that very oversight was raised by an architecture student attending a lecture delivered by the building's designer. While LeMessurier ignored the comment at the time, he was soon shocked to discover that the student was right: If his new building was hit by quartering winds at a not-impossible-for-New York City 70 miles per hour, its bolts would shear and its steel joints would begin to buckle and fail. If that happened, the whole fucking thing (which by then was open and full of people) would have toppled over (and landed on other buildings).

But this is where the story gets amazing: In a move as brilliant as it was callously designed to prevent bad PR, LeMessurier and Citicorp agreed to fix the building’s 200+ bolted joints in secret. Completely unknown to the public (and the thousands working in the building), laborers worked at night for six weeks to weld two-inch-thick steel plates over every bolted joint. Incredibly, not only were the clandestine repairs successful, but Citicorp kept the crisis secret—including any details of how the initial design might have killed thousands—until 1995.

So, hats off to that Columbia University architecture student, without his (or her) inquiring young mind, 1978's Hurricane Ella might have shoved this ugly fucker over.

rowley way

Over time, poured concrete corrodes in such a specifically ugly way that before long these buildings come to reek of the broken promises of the space age. A great example of this architectural disillusionment can be found in the Alexandra Road housing project in London's Camden borough. When it opened in 1972, this huge housing project, now known as 'Rowley Way,' looked like this:

Back when the style was new, I think it would be easy to love this building. After all, if Rowley Way hadn't been built in a poor neighborhood in northwest London, the 520-unit complex could have just as easily been built under a Fuller geodesic dome on the moon. For the first decade at least, this huge Logan's Run-looking board-marked unpainted reinforced concrete ziggurat probably recalled that great whiz-bang world to come that we were promised for so long. This is what it looks like now:

I think that after forty years of acid rain, concrete futurism recalls not rocket packs and romantic moon walks but Soviet-style scraped knees and tetanus and achingly long lines for bread and nylons.