Carol Willis

Building the Empire State celebrates the monumental achievement of the design and construction of the world's most famous skyscraper. The construction was orchestrated by the general contractors Starrett Brothers and Eken, the premier "skyline builders" of the 1920s. To organize the worksite, the office developed detailed charts that scheduled the delivery of the vast quantities of materials and recorded the progress of construction. A daily job diary recorded the number of workers by their trades. From these records, the company compiled an in-house notebook documenting the entire construction process. Only recently rediscovered in the files of HRH Construction Company, the successor to Starrett Brothers & Eken, the 1930s notebook is reproduced here for the first time. Introducing the historical text are essays that place the Empire State Building in historical context and explain the engineering and construction techniques for a general audience.… (mer)

I started undergraduate architecture school in 1991, two years after this book was published. If I would have been given this book back then, I probably wouldn't have thought much of it, since Deconstructivist architecture was all the rage and the projects in this book are fairly mild – with the occasional Postmodern flourish here and there – in comparison. All these years later, the book is, among other things, a great before-they-were-famous snapshot of some New York City architects addressing housing in the city. The book documents a joint project of the Architectural League of New York and New York's Department of Housing Preservation and Development that asked architects to propose designs for one of ten vacant-lot sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. The lots were seen as "the basis of a new strategy for reweaving the fabric of neighborhoods," such that the designs of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, Agrest & Gandelsonas, and others could be seen as opportunities for replication on other vacant infill sites. I'm pretty sure none of these designs were realized, but the Vacant Lots project shows that architects have always been spurred to tackle tough issues (in this case urban housing and its role in neighborhood life), even in the waning days of Postmodernism when, supposedly, architects were obsessed only with form and ornament.… (mer)