Word: architecte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Worcester & Beyond. Wallace Kirkman Harrison is strictly a working architect. He has written no books on what he has done or what architecture might or should do. When he is not tramping around an excavation or arguing with contractors, he can usually be found hard at work in his office-a big (6 ft. 2 in., 210 Ibs.), rumpled figure in shirtsleeves. He talks everyday American with a New England twang, and runs his firm like a football team. He quit school early and came up the hard way. He has very little time for play. In his hurry, singlemindedness...
...damn fool to go into building. Go into farming, that's where the money is." Nevertheless, he took Harrison on as an office boy, and later even let him diagram some stone designs. Harrison soon noticed something about the contracting business: the contractor took his orders from the architect. That decided him: he would be an architect...
...education by absorption there," he says. On his days off, he walked around New York studying such wonders as Fifth Avenue, Wall Street and the Woolworth Building. While still working for McKim, Mead & White, he got himself enrolled in the atelier of a top architect, Harvey Wiley Corbett, where in the evenings he drew, drew and redrew, while Corbett passed from desk to desk, criticizing and encouraging...
Time for a Change. In 1926, Harrison was the picture of a struggling young architect. He had saved up enough money to support a wife, a tall, 22-year-old blonde named Ellen Hunt Milton, whose brother had married John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s daughter, Abby. They were living in a small, two-room apartment in Manhattan's East 70s when Harrison's old teacher, Harvey Corbett, offered him a partnership. Harrison jumped at the chance, and for "the next four years designed a series of auditoriums and office buildings with Corbett. Architecture was almost his entire...
...designs had taken 18 months to finish. Architect Ray Hood had wanted the R.C.A. Building to look like a slab, but with staggered setbacks; Harrison battled for a single, uninterrupted cliff of stone. Harrison found himself alone and had to give in. That was not the only fight. The managerial firm of Todd, Robertson & Todd that Rockefeller had put over the architects wanted the whole group of buildings wrapped in Byzantine or Romanesque trim. The argument got hot; so did Harrison. Finally, he exploded out of his chair and sent it spinning. "Damn it!" he shouted, "you people just...