In the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Michael Wyet­zn­er talks about a fair few build­ings we’ve fea­tured over the years here on Open Cul­ture: the Impe­r­i­al Hotel, the Ennis House, Tal­iesin, Falling­wa­ter. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still stands as the embod­i­ment of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture more than 65 years after his death. That’s a fair­ly long stretch by mod­ern stan­dards, but nev­er­the­less a short­er one than Wright’s career, which ran over 70 years. Dur­ing his long life, Wyet­zn­er explains, Wright wit­nessed the intro­duc­tion of indoor plumb­ing, elec­tric­i­ty, the tele­phone, the auto­mo­bile, the air­plane, the radio, tele­vi­sion, and space trav­el — and even giv­en that, his archi­tec­ture shows a dra­mat­ic evo­lu­tion.

Begin­ning with Wright’s appren­tice­ship in Chica­go under Louis Sul­li­van, “the father of mod­ernism,” Wyet­zn­er con­tin­ues on to his devel­op­ment of the hor­i­zon­tal indoor-out­door “Prairie Style” house; his Japan­ese com­mis­sions and sub­se­quent much-pho­tographed Los Ange­les hous­es; the emer­gence of his phi­los­o­phy of “organ­ic archi­tec­ture” meant to uni­fy the build­ing with its site and nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment; his dis­cov­ery of the desert; and his Depres­sion-era con­cep­tion of the “Uson­ian house,” which adapt­ed his refined spa­tial sen­si­bil­i­ty for Amer­i­can-style mass pro­duc­tion. This would be more than enough for even the most dis­tin­guished archi­tec­t’s career. Yet it does­n’t even get around to such projects as the Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters, the R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, or his first and last dog­house.

No mat­ter which peri­od of Wright’s career you exam­ine, you can find evi­dence for his belief in the inspi­ra­tion of place, in organ­ic aes­thet­ics, in struc­tur­al expres­sive­ness, and even in indi­rect moral instruc­tion. Yet it’s also pos­si­ble to imag­ine that, in some sense, a series of dif­fer­ent Frank Lloyd Wrights exist­ed, repeat­ed­ly destroyed and recre­at­ed by pro­fes­sion­al set­back, per­son­al dis­as­ter, for­eign sojourn, immer­sion in a new land­scape, or even acquain­tance with a new tech­nol­o­gy. Sure­ly no one could remain pro­duc­tive to the end of his 92 years with­out a lit­tle re-inven­tion. Dur­ing that time, he designed more than 1,000 projects, only about half of which were ever built. Young archi­tects who idol­ize Frank Lloyd Wright would do well to remem­ber that he, too, knew full well the sting of nev­er mak­ing it to con­struc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Great­est Archi­tect? – A Free Stream­ing Doc­u­men­tary

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Cit­i­group Cen­ter in Mid­town Man­hat­tan is also known by its address, 601 Lex­ing­ton Avenue, at which it’s been stand­ing for 47 years, longer than the medi­an New York­er has been alive. Though still a fair­ly hand­some build­ing, in a sev­en­ties-cor­po­rate sort of way, it now pops out only mild­ly on the sky­line. At street lev­el, though, the build­ing con­tin­ues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-look­ing columns placed not at the cor­ners, but in the mid­dle of the walls. A vis­i­tor with no knowl­edge of struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing pass­ing the Cit­i­group Cen­ter for the first time may won­der why it does­n’t fall down — which, for a few months in 1978, was a gen­uine­ly seri­ous con­cern.

This sto­ry, told with a spe­cial explana­to­ry vivid­ness in the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, usu­al­ly begins with a phone call. An uniden­ti­fied archi­tec­ture stu­dent got ahold of William LeMes­suri­er, the struc­tur­al engi­neer of the Citi­corp Cen­ter, as it was then known, to relay con­cerns he’d heard a pro­fes­sor express about the still-new sky­scrap­er’s abil­i­ty to with­stand “quar­ter­ing winds,” which blow diag­o­nal­ly at its cor­ners. LeMes­suri­er took the time to walk the stu­dent through the ele­ments of his then-ground­break­ing light­weight design, which includ­ed chevron-shaped braces that direct­ed ten­sion loads down to the columns and a 400-ton con­crete tuned mass damper (or “great block of cheese,” as it got to be called) meant to coun­ter­act oscil­la­tion move­ments.

LeMes­suri­er was a proud pro­fes­sion­al, but his pro­fes­sion­al­ism out­weighed his pride. When he went back to check the Citi­corp Cen­ter’s plans, he received an unpleas­ant sur­prise: the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny had swapped out the weld­ed joints in those chevron braces for cheap­er bolt­ed ones. His office had approved the change, which made sense at the time, and had also tak­en into account only per­pen­dic­u­lar winds, not quar­ter­ing winds, as was then stan­dard indus­try prac­tice. Per­form­ing the rel­e­vant cal­cu­la­tions him­self, he deter­mined that the whole tow­er could be brought down — and much in the sur­round­ing area destroyed with it — by the kind of winds that have a one-in-six­teen chance of blow­ing in any giv­en year.

It did­n’t take LeMes­suri­er long to real­ize that he had no choice but to reveal what he’d dis­cov­ered to Citi­corp, whose lead­er­ship coop­er­at­ed with the accel­er­at­ed, semi-clan­des­tine project of shoring up their gleam­ing emblem’s struc­tur­al joints by night. The work could hard­ly fail to draw the atten­tion of the New York press, of course, but it received scant cov­er­age thanks to an impec­ca­bly timed news­pa­per strike, and on its com­ple­tion made the sky­scraper per­haps the safest in the city. In fact, the sto­ry of the Citi­corp Cen­ter dis­as­ter that was­n’t only came out pub­licly in a 1995 New York­er piece by Joseph Mor­gen­stern, which made LeMes­suri­er a kind of hero among struc­tur­al engi­neers. But it was the stu­dents who’d iden­ti­fied the build­ing’s faults, not just one but two of whom came for­ward there­after, who per­son­i­fied the life-sav­ing pow­er of ask­ing the right ques­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter is a “house muse­um,” first designed as a res­i­dence, and now open to the pub­lic. In fact, as the insti­tu­tion’s direc­tor Justin Gun­ther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the mod­ern move­ment to open as a pub­lic site,” hav­ing begun offer­ing tours in 1964. The open­ness of Falling­wa­ter owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kauf­mann Jr., the son of the Pitts­burgh depart­ment-store mag­nate who com­mis­sioned the house in the first place. The fam­i­ly hap­pened to own a piece of land in south­ern Penn­syl­va­nia that was once an employ­ee retreat, and Kauf­mann fils, high on a read­ing of Wright’s recent­ly pub­lished auto­bi­og­ra­phy, knew just who should design a week­end home for the site.

Not that it was a sim­ple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luck­i­ly, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just estab­lished an appren­tice­ship pro­gram at Tal­iesin.” The young Kauf­mann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, know­ing who the Kauf­manns were, could sniff out a good poten­tial client.”

Soon accept­ed, Kauf­mann spent about six months study­ing under Wright, dur­ing which time his vis­it­ing par­ents also became “enam­ored with Wright’s ideas of organ­ic archi­tec­ture.” No oth­er liv­ing archi­tect, per­haps, could deliv­er on the promise of a house ful­ly inspired by its nat­ur­al con­text, which in this case includ­ed a water­fall. Still, one won­ders if even his most eager clients under­stood just what they were get­ting into.

“The Kauf­manns thought that they were going to have a house that was look­ing at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had dif­fer­ent ideas. He thought that if you put the most dra­mat­ic part of a land­scape in your view con­stant­ly, it would become some­thing that’s tire­some. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the land­scape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the water­fall instead, by local labor­ers and using stone quar­ried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impres­sion, and one that makes per­fect aes­thet­ic sense: as Gun­ther puts it, “the water­fall can’t live with­out the house, and the house can’t live with­out the water­fall.” Nor, these near­ly nine decades after the main build­ing’s com­ple­tion, is the course of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture quite imag­in­able with­out Falling­wa­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Most tourists in Rome put the Colos­se­um at the top of their to-see list. (My own sis­ter-in-law, soon to head out on her Ital­ian hon­ey­moon, plans to head to that sto­ried ruin more or less straight from the air­port.) Even those with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion, step­ping into the space that was once the are­na — from the Latin hare­na, refer­ring to the sand laid down to absorb blood shed in com­bat — fills the imag­i­na­tion with images of glad­i­a­tors, lions, sen­a­tors glow­er­ing from their court­side seats, and the bay­ing mass­es behind them. But their visions may not include oth­er such true-to-his­to­ry details as trap doors, staged naval bat­tles, and a sub­ter­ranean sys­tem of tun­nels and ele­va­tors, all of which are explained in the new Decon­struct­ed video above.

Even casu­al Rome enthu­si­asts all know that com­peti­tors and oth­er per­form­ers, both human and ani­mal, made their offi­cial Colos­se­um entrances through the floor. (Announce­ments were made some years ago to the effect that the mech­a­nized floor that made such the­atrics pos­si­ble would be rebuilt by 2023 — a project that seems not to have made much progress as yet, though whether it will end up being put off as long as the Strait of Messi­na Bridge remains to be seen.)

But only the most obses­sive already have a clear under­stand­ing of exact­ly how it worked, which this video clear­ly explains in both words and 3D ren­der­ings, restor­ing ele­ments of not just the build­ing itself but also its imme­di­ate urban con­text that have long since been lost to time.

Take the velar­i­um, a retractable awning con­sist­ing of “long strips of fab­ric wound around drums, which were mount­ed on a wood­en frame and sup­port­ed by 240 masts fixed into sock­ets along the amphithe­ater’s upper cor­nice.” With each of its 240 strips oper­at­ed by a sep­a­rate winch, it required at least as many human oper­a­tors to deploy or retract at speed — a greater speed, per­haps, than the oper­a­tion of some of the retractable roofs incor­po­rat­ed into sports facil­i­ties today. Not “just a feat of engi­neer­ing, but also a pre­cur­sor for mod­ern sta­di­um design,” the velar­i­um addressed a prob­lem that will hard­ly escape the notice of mod­ern tourists today — espe­cial­ly those who vis­it the Colos­se­um in the mid­dle of a sum­mer day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Build­ing the Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

What Hap­pened to the Miss­ing Half of the Roman Colos­se­um?

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Colos­se­um Today?

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: the Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

For all the means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange we’ve estab­lished between the cul­tures of the world, no mat­ter how dis­tant they may be from one anoth­er, we still have no tru­ly uni­ver­sal sin­gle human lan­guage. The rea­son could date back to antiq­ui­ty, when we first attempt­ed a grand col­lec­tive project: that of build­ing a tow­er that would reach the heav­ens. Deter­mined to pun­ish our effron­tery, God not only destroyed the work in progress, but ren­dered our lan­guages mutu­al­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble in order to hin­der any fur­ther attempts to do it again. Or at least that’s how one sto­ry goes.

You may not sub­scribe to a lit­er­al read­ing of the account of the Tow­er of Babel as it appears in the Bible’s Book of Gen­e­sis, but accord­ing to the Hochela­ga video above, the struc­ture does have a fair­ly plau­si­ble basis in his­to­ry.

It could be a leg­endary ver­sion of Ete­me­nan­ki, a Mesopotami­an zig­gu­rat built to hon­or the god Mar­duk at such a scale that it inspired tall tales, as it were, spread far and wide in the ancient world, such as the rumor that its con­struc­tion required mobi­liz­ing the man­pow­er of all human­i­ty. But it real­ly did exist, as evi­denced by its ruins dis­cov­ered at the site of the ancient city of Baby­lon — which, in Hebrew, was called Babel.

A cuneiform-cov­ered tablet con­ve­nient­ly found at the same loca­tion describes a con­struc­tion project of Ete­me­nanki’s size as using mate­ri­als like bitu­men and baked brick, which aligns with bib­li­cal details of the Tow­er of Babel, as do the Greek his­to­ri­an Herodotus’s ref­er­ences to its lay­out and struc­ture. Also rel­e­vant is the Baby­lo­ni­ans’ 587 BC inva­sion of Jerusalem, which brought cap­tives to the cap­i­tal. It’s hard­ly impos­si­ble that some of those dis­placed Jews would have the loom­ing Ete­me­nan­ki in mind when they went on to write the his­to­ries that would ulti­mate­ly find their way into the Hebrew Bible. They may have had no hope of return­ing to their home­land, but they must, at least, have felt rea­son­ably cer­tain that Mar­duk’s days were num­bered.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Map of All the Coun­tries Men­tioned in the Bible: What The Coun­tries Were Called Then, and Now

Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Northrop Frye Teach­es “The Bible and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture”: All 25 Lec­tures Free Online

A Sur­vival Guide to the Bib­li­cal Apoc­a­lypse

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Wit­ty, Eru­dite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

Vis­it the Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Cur­rent­ly, the tallest build­ings in New York City are One World Trade Cen­ter, Cen­tral Park Tow­er, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were com­plet­ed in the twen­ty-twen­ties, and all of them have attract­ed com­ment, some­times admir­ing, some­times bewil­dered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Wool­worth Build­ing, the Chrysler Build­ing, and the Empire State Build­ing, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest build­ing in the world. Here to explain these endur­ing “big stars of the New York City sky­line” is archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the sto­ry of all their impor­tant details, inside and out.

In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obses­sion to Detail,” a new series from Dai­ly Mail Busi­ness YouTube chan­nel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of archi­tec­tur­al com­men­tary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job.

He knows that the Wool­worth Build­ing’s lob­by con­tains gar­goyle-like car­i­ca­tures of its archi­tect and client; that the Chrysler Build­ing once had a pri­vate club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a paint­ing of the New York sky­line and a view of the real thing; that the 86-sto­ry Empire State Build­ing is pro­mot­ed as hav­ing 102 sto­ries only by includ­ing its unused diri­gi­ble moor­ing mast and sub-base­ments; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the ver­ti­cal style,” in ref­er­ence to the pro­por­tions its build­ings were rapid­ly gain­ing.

An expe­ri­enced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he did­n’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s pre­sum­ably also part of his job to frame the process­es that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these sky­scrap­ers as in keep­ing with the cease­less one-upman­ship and self-pro­mo­tion that is the spir­it of his city. A par­tic­u­lar­ly illus­tra­tive episode occurred when Minoru Yamasak­i’s orig­i­nal World Trade Cen­ter went up in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, which pro­voked a response from the Empire State Build­ing in the form of a rec­tan­gu­lar addi­tion on top that would pre­serve its sta­tus as the world’s tallest build­ing. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the archi­tect who designed that pro­pos­al if he was seri­ous. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for pub­lic rela­tions. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

The Sto­ry of the Flat­iron Build­ing, “New York’s Strangest Tow­er”

An Immer­sive, Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.