Word: slab
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There will be a few important differences. Where U.N.'s skyscraper slab rises 39 stories, UNESCO's is planned for only 16; where the U.N. spent $67.5 million, UNESCO expects to spent $7,678,000. Instead of adopting air-conditioning throughout, as U.N. did, UNESCO plans to keep cool by using blue glass sun screens down the south and east sides, with a sprinkler system to sluice dirt and dust off the glass. Instead of sitting on a solid, enclosed base, UNESCO will rest on ground-floor stilts such as France's famed Le Corbusier tried...
Windowless Walls. Though most of the kudos for the overall slab design must go to Corbusier, the panel credits Harrison with translating the basic ideas into blueprints. The final decisions were also his, as chief planner. Most of the time he would sit back, listen to the arguments, then advance his own practical solutions. When the group was satisfied that it had sketched out a workable U.N. workshop, it was time to think about "making a monument." Part of the solution was to sheath the two ends of the Secretariat in unbroken, windowless walls of marble. But even here, Harrison...
...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...
...Ohio's Oberlin College, a $3.500,000 office for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Manhattan, and a $22 million public housing project (1,800 apartments) in Brooklyn. Near Pittsburgh's "golden triangle" stand two brand-new Harrison skyscrapers. One is a 41-story, $23 million slab sheathed in limestone and glittering stainless steel for U.S. Steel and the Mellon National Bank; the other is a 30-story office building for the Aluminum Co. of America...
...Slab-shaped buildings-long and narrow but tall enough to be vast-are exciting today's architects as pencil-point skyscrapers did their predecessors. No man has done more than Wallace Harrison to make the idea a reality: he cloaked it with stone in creating Rockefeller Center and with glass in the U.N. Secretariat...