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Great Buildings Online documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photos, drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more. Swiss-based architecture portal Vitruvio holds info on great buildings and famous architects, plus "images, drawings, texts and links of primitive architecture and also of Origine, Pre-Columbian, Greek, Roman, Medieval, Oriental, Renaissance, Baroque, NeoClassical, Contemporary, Future architecture." American Institute of Architects The Mediterranean Images server from the Australian National U. contains around 165,000 images (count them!), or about 48 gigabytes of architecture & art, mainly from the Mediterranean basin area, plus Japan, India & Cambodia, searchable and browsable. The online version of Architectural Record has free content, including departments such as "digital architect", "green architect", and interviews. The National Building Museum site has exhibition excerpts online, Quicktime Virtual Reality images of the Great Hall of the museum itself, articles and images from back issues of 'Blueprints' magazine, links, and more. American Memory from the Library of Congress, features photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, taken between 1880 and 1920, including 378 photos of buildings, among which are 93 skyscrapers. Architecture in Fine Prints is an online exhibit from Georgetown U. about the art of the architect, recorded in fine prints across generations, with many excellent images. The Lighthouse Directory provides information and links for more than 17,200 of the world's lighthouses. The Chicago Imagebase is "a wide variety of images and other data along with information on how to use this data to study the city" provided by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The images are primarily historical, from before the great fire of 1871 to the present. Oak Park, Illinois is home to 25 Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings and houses built between 1889 and 1913. In Oak Park Wright developed and perfected his "Prairie Style" architecture, emphasizing interior light and open spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park has photos and descriptions of all 25 structures. More Frank Lloyd Wright resources: All-Wright Site - Wright on the Web The R. Buckminster Fuller Institute has pages on Geodesic Domes and the Dymaxion house. The Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley links to many architectural resources. |
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The Trade Center will have a gross floor area nearly triple that of the Pentagon; the five-storied base for the towers and a roomy plaza cover a 16-acre site that will require the abandonment of several existing streets. Yamasaki has switched from concrete, his favorite medium, to steel because of the sheer height of the towers, and instead of having the weight of the structure carried by the frame and the elevator core, the great steel columns of the exterior walls will support it. The stainless-steel outer ribs are only 22 inches apart, with glass between, giving the effect of a glistening steel unbroken by horizontal window lines; from within, the tenants will look down on the rest of town through glazed bowman's slots. Babylon, Beaux-Arts. Yamasaki will be faced with a problem that many notable architects come up against nowadays: working "in association with" another firm of building planners on the job. As in the case of the Gropius-Belluschi Pan Am building in Manhattan, the "associates" will be the firm of Emery Roth & Sons, whose glassy budget ziggurats have transformed much of the city into a white-collar Babylon. Whether Yama can maintain his usual no-detail-is-too-small control over the project's construction is a question that bothers many of his fellow architects. Says one: "I don't think he can. It's a tragic mistake." Even if Yama triumphs, there are other sure losers in the picture. The 33-year-old Empire State Building will no longer be able to call itself (with 102 floors, 124 ft.) the tallest building in the world,* will join such other has-beens as the Singer, the Woolworth and the Chrysler buildings. And one of Manhattan's beaux-arts monuments, the splendid old U.S. Customs House, designed in 1901 by Cass Gilbert, will lose its identity-- and possibly its existence-- as all customs operations are shifted to the World Trade Center. Progress in New York moves onward and 1353 ½ ft. upward. * Though its TV mast will still top the Trade Center by 116 ½ ft. |
Eventually the WTC, which was not completed until 1976, got a TV mast as well.
August 1959 interview with Minoru Yamasaki - Yamasaki & Associates ceased operations in January 2010.