Another new (for me) design voice

Tom Vanderbilt (presumably a nom de plume -- what a great combo of down home and high society for a writer about NYC architecture!) reviews a book on New York City's Pan Am Building in style:

When the Pan Am Building was completed, in 1963, we learn from Meredith Clausen's meticulously well-observed, elegiac study, it could legitimately claim to be the world's biggest, most ambitious, most staggeringly modern edifice: It boasted the largest mortgage ever, the most steel ever ordered for a single construction job, the largest internal transportation system (sixty-three high-speed elevators), and more square footage than any other office building. Not only that, but it was designed to hold as many people as the entire city of Butte, Montana, and had its own special automated centralized telephone exchange, the world's first. Its heliport was the highest in the world. And to top it all off, it was designed by the academic giants Gropius and Belluschi, European émigrés with storied pedigrees.

How, then, did the Pan Am Building become perhaps the most loathed structure in New York's history, the Waterloo of modernist architecture in the United States? Why is it that what should have represented the apogee of a career for two accomplished architects turned instead into an embarrassing footnote that judicious obit writers strove to omit?

Comments

[Hal O'Brien]

This seems to be Vanderbilt's quickie bio, over at Design Observer.

Maybe it's because I've had to input too many names into databases of customers, but I hardly ever think any name is necessarily invented. 295 million datapoints in the US alone, from every conceivable origin, is just too big. And it's not like either the first or last name is terribly rare.