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

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

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

Storm, Othello, The Merchant of Venice

j

hamlet

clarifies Torrijos. And from

hamlet

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

“Goodbye, goodbye, remember me,” ran Hugh Stubbins and William LeMessurier, the failed heroes

the crystal storm

after he slipped

From fame to tragedy

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

Citicorp Center

. Its well-documented case is studied in all architecture schools in the world.

What was heroic and tragic about this project? your initial hypothesis.

The site selected was adjacent to Citicorp’s traditional headquarters on 53rd Street in Manhattan.

and was occupied by an impoverished but proud Lutheran church. His community refused to give up their home, not even for all the gold in the world, but instead agreed to sell their air rights to their bank neighbors, who coveted the property to install their new power plant. Stubbins and LeMessurier were commissioned to build a bottomless skyscraper there.

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

Her owner sells her and agrees not to farm on her

. And the neighbor buys them in order to be able to install windows in the partition without later work covering them up. This is normal what has been done in Manhattan since the 19th century. In the case of Citicorp, the rights were used to build a building on top of each other. CitiCorp built its tower not on the church’s ground, but on its air. It was the first time that a building was mounted on top of one another. After doing it a few times, it’s fairly common.

Stubbins and especially LeMessurier act as

undisputed heroes

in the first half of the book: They accomplish the impossible by building a 279 meter high tower on an empty 30 meter high podium, with an impossible foundation based on four off-center cores. They did it in 1970s New York, impoverished and violent (and which includes Torrijos’ characters).

Olympic indifferent

) and with hitherto unimaginable efficiency criteria. They invented the mass damper, which was a great idea and is used in many towers today: since the wind only sometimes loads the building, it is necessary to have a structure that protects it permanently

unnecessary waste of energy

. LeMessurier invented a structure that turns on and off and is there only when needed.

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

a conceptual rift

That could lead to collapse on any stormy day. Conclusion: The engineers prepared their tower to withstand headwinds, but

They didn’t think of the diagonal winds

. The Glass Storm tells the story of the discovery of this error and Stubbins and LeMessurier’s journey from fame to infamy. And in the end he triggers a very Shakespearean storm in them too, so that they try to redeem themselves.

In fact, what happened in the Citicorp case was more than a costly sin

a succession of disasters, of failures falling to the ground like dominoes

. The wind tests were carried out in frontal gales, but that was what the norm dictated and nobody had done anything else before, explains Torrijos.

In his novel there is a different type of hero, more of a heroine: Diane Hartley, an engineering student, spotted 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 set about saving the building. Hartley is a real person; Longo, a fictional hybrid of two characters who played a part in the true story of Citicorp.

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

It is a

thriller

because that

thriller

I believe in that and Aaron Sorkin is my God.

says Torrijos. The development of the real characters is similar to that of a novel. There are documentaries and interviews about LeMessurier, we know that he liked to think of himself as a hero and listen to Wagner. But I put a lot of myself into his character. First I did it unconsciously and then consciously.

He has a lot of what I was up until 13 years ago because something similar happened to me

… on a different 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 was not so bad. Or it was, I don’t know, it depends on the person. For me it was a major trauma. I have entered a difficult time with a

obsessive compulsive disorder

that I have learned to control with therapy and pharmacology. That’s actually when I started writing this book.

Torrijos is perhaps the greatest propagator of architecture in Spain of his generation, so there is a great temptation to view this novel as such

an extension of this work as a cultural commentator

. Shakespeare’s quotes clear up this misunderstanding:

the crystal storm

He does not speak of forms, masses, structures or materials. Talk about human nature with its peculiarities.

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