Books, Arts & Manners

The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment By Reyner Banham University of Chicago, $15 Should you need to design a skyscraper, Buckminster Fuller has explained (Saturday Review, July 13, 1968) how it’s done. A skyscraper converts urban land into a profitable investment by stacking tenants in layers within the site’s confines. The mortgaging bank will specify how many tenants, therefore how many layers. Next the layer-count yields the scale of the elevator services, also of the plumbing, heating, lighting and air-conditioning gadgetry. All these are designed by suppliers whose engineers you can ring up. They constitute the service stack, and without it (mind!) the building would be as pointless as an airframe without engines.

For if hydraulic engineers could not make toilets flush 102 floors aloft, if foul air could not be withdrawn from a thousand-foot monolith without winds sufficient to make paperwork impossible, no Empire State Building would have been worth contemplating. And immense machines that make the building workable, stacked on the acreage that will make it profitable, so dictate its structure as to leave the architect little more than a cosmetic function. He may, ifheisa Stone or a Pei, impose on it for a fee his visual trademark, his mannered grille-work or slabwork. Otherwise he is (says Fuller) “just an aesthetical, good-taste purchasing agent and ways-and-means detailer—who is practiced in finding and organizing the usable space amongst the columns, pipes and elevator stacks.”

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Hugh Kenner

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The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment By Reyner Banham University of Chicago, $15 Should you need to design a skyscraper, Buckminster Fuller has explained (Saturday Review, July 13, 1968) how it’s done. A skyscraper converts urban land into a profitable investment by stacking tenants in layers within the site’s confines. The mortgaging bank will specify how many tenants, therefore how many layers. Next the layer-count yields the scale of the elevator services, also of the plumbing, heating, lighting and air-conditioning gadgetry. All these are designed by suppliers whose engineers you can ring up. They constitute the service stack, and without it (mind!) the building would be as pointless as an airframe without engines.

For if hydraulic engineers could not make toilets flush 102 floors aloft, if foul air could not be withdrawn from a thousand-foot monolith without winds sufficient to make paperwork impossible, no Empire State Building would have been worth contemplating. And immense machines that make the building workable, stacked on the acreage that will make it profitable, so dictate its structure as to leave the architect little more than a cosmetic function. He may, ifheisa Stone or a Pei, impose on it for a fee his visual trademark, his mannered grille-work or slabwork. Otherwise he is (says Fuller) “just an aesthetical, good-taste purchasing agent and ways-and-means detailer—who is practiced in finding and organizing the usable space amongst the columns, pipes and elevator stacks.”