In January 1944, Wright described his choice of color and material as “Exterior: Red-marble and long-slim pottery red bricks.”

If Wright had had his way with his wealthy client, Solomon R. Guggenheim, the mining entrepreneur, the Guggenheim Museum would not have been near white. The architect made designs not only in red, but in pink, peach, and a sort of ivory. He also proposed black marble.

In the end, Wright finally specified a paint color identified as “PV020 Buff.” By the time of the opening in October 1959, Wright was dead and the color had been changed on the job to a tint of cream and very soft yellow.

{ NY Times | full story | slide show }

{ Selgas Cano architects office, Madrid | more }

{ The architect Santiago Calatrava with his current model for a transportation hub at ground zero in downtown Manhattan. | Full story }

A professor at Oxford University in England has done a compelling series of studies trying to get at why big public-works projects such as bridges, tunnels and light-rail systems almost always turn out to be far more costly than estimated.

“It cannot be explained by error,” sums up one of his papers, matter-of-factly. (…) It’s not technical challenges or complexity or bad luck, he asserts. If that were so, you’d get more variation in how it all turns out. He concludes the backers of these projects suffer from two main maladies.

One is “delusional optimism” — they want it so badly, they can’t see its flaws. I know about this firsthand from when I supported the monorail.

The second is worse: They knowingly are lying to the public.

“Delusion and Deception in Large Infrastructure Projects,” was the title of Flyvbjerg’s most recent paper, published in January. He details through interviews with public officials how the pressure to get a project approved politically and under construction almost invariably leads to deception — a lowballing of costs and an exaggeration of benefits.

{ Seattle Times | Continue reading }

Despite the inherently social nature of architecture and city planning, personal histories of master builders were uncommon before the last century, and are still greatly outnumbered by biographies of painters and sculptors. A turning point in the public’s perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s An Autobiography of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn’t the slightest inkling of what architects actually did. Wright’s self-portrait as a heroic individualist served as the prototype for Howard Roark, the architect-protagonist of Ayn Rand’s 1943 best-seller, The Fountainhead. But the novelist transmogrified Wright’s entertaining egotism into Roark’s suffocating megalomania, an image closer to that of another contemporary coprofessional: Le Corbusier, the pseudonymous Swiss-French architect and urbanist born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887, twenty years after Wright.

Le Corbusier was the only one of Wright’s competitors who matched his flair for self-promotion. However, Le Corbusier’s posthumous influence has outstripped that of the greatest American architect. His schemes were often less specific to their sites than Wright’s, and thus more adaptable elsewhere. Le Corbusier’s work in South America and India won him a third-world following Wright never attracted. And his “Five Points of a New Architecture” of 1926 became a modern “must” list that could be copied by almost anyone, anywhere. It included thin piloti columns on which buildings could be based; ribbon windows; open floor plans; façades freed from load-bearing structure; and roof gardens. Such formularization was also central to the steel-skeleton, glass-skin high-rise format later perfected by a third contemporary, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it did not offer the recombinations possible with the “Five Points.”

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

A new wooden water tank went up last week atop 202 West 40th Street in Manhattan, through the efforts of the Rosenwach Tank Company of Long Island City, Queens. Every building at least 80 feet tall in New York City must have a water reservoir to meet the fire codes, and water tanks are also used to provide water service.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | slide show }

In the 1800s, New York City required that all buildings higher than 6 stories be equipped with a rooftop water tower. This was necessary to prevent the need for excessively high pressures at lower elevations, which could burst pipes.

In modern times, the towers have become fashionable in some circles. As of 2006, the neighborhood of Tribeca requires water towers on all buildings, whether or not they are being used. Two companies in New York build water towers, both of which are family businesses in operation since the 1800s.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The Rosenwach Tank Company is one of a very few rooftop-tank coopers left in the city. No one has ever come up with a better way of making a rooftop water tank than by girdling a cylinder of wooden staves with metal hoops and adding a conical roof, and New York, which has thousands of cylindrical wooden rooftop water tanks with conical roofs, couldn’t exist without them.

The tanks are here because the water that comes into town through the aqueducts will rise to about the sixth floor without any assistance but has to be pumped to tanks on top of taller buildings to provide water pressure on their upper floors. This scheme provides plenty pressure, because the water arrives at those floors by falling straight down.

Rosenwach has built and installed well over half of the city’s tanks. Many of New York’s Rosenwach tanks were constructed in twenties, under the regime of Julius Rosenwach, the father of Wallace Rosenwach who is the current president. Julius Rosenwach moved the business to Greenpoint (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) from Grand street, Manhattan, fifty-four years ago.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

{ Buddhist temple built using 1.5 million recycled beer bottles }

{ Walt Disney in front of a still-unfinished Sleeping Beauty’s Castle / Castle nears completion | Disneyland, Los Angeles, 1955 | Los Angeles Examiner collection | more }

related { Interview with Walt Disney }

scanned from { The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher }

{ Frank Lloyd Wright, S.C. Johnson & Son Administration Building, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936 | more }

{ Multi-level underground city, Derinkuyu, Turkey | El Rincón del Misterio | more | Wikipedia }

{ Bank of Oklahoma Tower (originally One Williams Center), Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA | built in 1975 and designed by Minoru Yamasaki & Associates | 667 ft/203m, 52 stories | Wikipedia | more photos }

{ The Bank of Oklahoma (BOk) Tower looks startlingly like a lone, shrunken World Trade Center tower—which is what it is. It was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the Twin Towers’ architect, for the Williams Center, an urban renewal project planned in imitation of the World Trade Center. | The Believer | Continue reading }

previously { The World Trade Center, 1966-2001 }

related { Architects and developers are focused on erecting icons. Why most fall short. }