Word: spire
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Look out, boys! Spire Agnew's gonna get your balls...
...Manhattan, a 45-story office building would be lost in the crowd. In San Francisco it would not, especially if it were topped by a 220-ft. spire and had the overall shape of a very sharp pyramid. The building in question is the proposed $30 million head office of Transamerica Corporation. When erected, it will be the tallest building in the West, and the issues it raises go straight to the heart of one of the most vexing problems of urban planning: where should the line be drawn between private convenience and the public good, especially when the public...
...chief critics is San Francisco's Planning Director Allan B. Jacobs (whose powers, however, are strictly advisory). "This is unmistakably a 'look-at-me' building that does not complement the buildings near it," he says. Architecture Critic Wolf von Eckardt questions the function of the spire: "Is [it] to stamp a Transamerica Corporation trademark on one of the most breathtaking skylines in the world?" The Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects argued that Transamerica could save the skyline and fulfill all its space requirements in a building only 300 to 400 ft. high...
...might be called a virtuoso of the eclectic. St. Paul's combines coupled columns from the Louvre with the triple-layered dome of Mansart's Hotel des Invalides. It served as a model for the U.S. Capitol dome. At St. Mary leBow, he placed a pyramidal spire atop a Renaissance balustrade atop an antique classical temple, all atop a belfry that stands slightly catercorner from the church itself...
...memoirs, Vienna's Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel recalled her three-year affair with Painter Oskar Kokoschka as "one fierce battle of love. Never before had I tasted so much tension, so much hell, so much paradise." Never after ward, she might have added, did she in spire so many fascinating and often memorable works...