Trump's trumpery

Six years of Donald Trump in the White House, and likely two more. But we made it through, kudos in part to the Blue Wave that will (hopefully) check and balance his power.

Forty-three years of the Trump Tower on 5th Avenue. But this Blue Wave still doesn't make it in my book, bold as it may look.

That was how it shanghaied me from a New York exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright—to whose daintily wrought Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, this trumpery extravaganza of blue tinted-glass tomfoolery and pink-marble pomp can't hold a candle. But since its namesake added the Oval Office (and its proposed ballroom) to his real estate holdings, the Trump Tower became a more desired destination than it had been upon its 1983 inauguration. And its curtain wall's corner-office zigzaggery seems to scream even more for attention, with the panache of the Prez himself.

Trump Tower, New York, looking up. Photo by Bin im Garten.

Jerry Lewis thought Trump would make a good president for being a good "showman." The Trump Tower tries to be just that, with all the marks of its moniker: style without substance, pizzazz without purpose, air without art, artifice without architecture (without good architecture, that is), Trump without Triumph.

Price Tower, Bartlesville, Okla. (1956, Frank Lloyd Wright)
Photo by John from Tulsa, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Compare the Trump Tower to the Price Tower. Described by its designer as "the tree that escaped the crowded forest," the Price Tower certainly challenges all skyscraper stereotypes and conventions in its carefully massed columns of pine-like projections and forest-green hues, with a rich variety of patterns, textures, alternations and variations to keep the eye involved, and to even want to take the elevator upward to one or more of the units to venture inside them. 

And the upward soar of each of its parts, expressing and differentiating individual service cores and stacks of luxury units during their skyward ascents, calls to mind the growth of a tree, as a crowning example of Wright's organic architecture, derived from nature rather than imposed on it. 

Trump Tower tree terraces. Photo by Kidfly182.

The Trump Tower, however, is a mere geometric playbook, catching the eye for the dramatic immediacy of its showmanship, the in-your-face affluence of its interior finishes, and its use of trees on terraces as ornamental display rather than the ecological complement of design. (I'm told that the Trump Organization put those treed terraces on the zigzag setbacks in exchange for more floor square footage inside. Typical Trump real estate bargaining for a density bonus, not unlike what he's doing with his White House ballroom.)

Trump Tower atrium. Photo by Sebastian Bergmann.

Oddly enough, Trump Tower was one of my mother's favorite buildings in New York. Built long before a Trump presidency could be imagined, it was the tourist attraction she could never wait to take a taxi to, due mainly to the cascading marble fountain in its atrium, which takes the form of a sculptural abstraction of a waterfall as it trickles and splashes down to the pool below, leading the eye up and down the stacks of mezzanines, cantilevers, gardens, stores, restaurants and bars, forcing us to gawk at its multilevel marble and glass and its skylight's soar.

Fountain in Trump Tower atrium. Photo by Alistair McMillan.

Admittedly, the 60-foot-tall waterfall is the best part of the building. Its stacked aggregate of marble cubes, sparked with accent lighting, creates a splashfest that muffles the noise in the atrium and forges a calming environment for lunch, coffee or drinks. It also provides a stunning spectacle for shoppers from the suspended walkway and six balconies overlooking it. 

Der Scutt, the tower's architect, was at his most imaginative here, but the real kudos is thought to go to Ivana Trump, who is said to have had a major say in the selection of Breccia Pernice marble. Quarried in in the Monte Pastello and Volargne stoneworking regions of Verona, Italy, it is eye-catching for its angular ivory, cream and white fragments set in a warm peachy-rose, honey, sienna, or red field, as an explosion of rich colors.

Trump Tower Atrium. Photo by Fletcher6.

But the rest of the building's interior feels just like a typical 1980s shopping mall, where marble, glass, brass, mirrors and gold were heavily slathered on to "Make Shopping Great Again," as an attractive upscale antidote to the Victor Gruen ho-hum of the '50s-'60s malls that were wearing thin after several decades.

Top-down view of Trump Tower atrium.
Photo by Julian Stallabrass.

In spite of that, the tower and its atrium got a smorgasbord of bad reviews, all deserved. William E. Geist of The New York Times deemed it a "Xanadu of conspicuous consumption" that was "preposterously lavish" and "showy, even pretentious." (Sound familiar?) Architect Gregory Stanford called the atrium "pretty horrible." (Sorry, Mom.) The fifth edition of the AIA Guide to New York City called the tower "a fantasyland for the affluent shopper" concealed by "folded glass." Fodor's New York City 2010 guide and Insight Guides were right on the money: Fodors said the "ostentatious atrium" exemplified the "unbridled luxury" of the 1980s, with its "expensive boutiques and gaudy brass everywhere," and Insight Guides said Trump Tower was "worth stopping by for a glimpse of the opulence synonymous with Manhattan in the 1980s." (Which made it timely with the conspicuous consumption and unbridled capitalism of the Reagan era, as if it was an advance preparation for Trump's coast to Washington on the Gipper's coattails.)

Bonwit Teller, c.1930s, demolished for the Trump Tower.

Yes, commerce trumps design here, filling our eyeballs with the ostentatious display of wealth we can't even hope to be able to afford, as a precursor to the sententious showmanship and the Mar-a-Lago monstrosity we got from its developer when he attained the White House (twice). But my partiality against the Trump Tower is mainly due to his totaling of the historic 1929 Art Deco Bonwit Teller store that stood on its site (designed by Warren & Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal), after he promised to preserve and donate the building's Art Deco aluminum-bronze friezes of dancing female figures and bronze grillework to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was yet another harbinger of the lies, broken promises, and deception that would characterize his presidencies.

"If Bonwit’s signified impeccable style and taste, Trump Tower was everything garish and tacky," said blogger Sally Edelstein. "Like the real estate developer himself." I couldn't agree more.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Breccia Pernice," Architectural Surfaces, https://arcsurfaces.com/live-inventory/breccia-pernice/119477/

de Monchaux, Thomas, "Seeing Trump in Trump Tower," The New Yorker, October 6, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/seeing-trump-in-trump-tower

Edelstein, Sally, "The Travesty of Trump Tower and Bonwit Teller," Envisioning the American Dream, October 22, 2025, https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2025/10/22/the-travesty-of-trump-tower-and-bonwit-teller-2/

Geist, William E., "The Expanding Empire of Donald Trump," The New York Times, April 8, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/08/magazine/the-expanding-empire-of-donald-trump.html

Lisicky, Michael, "How Donald Trump Took Down Bonwit Teller, A Fifth Avenue Landmark," Forbes, October 3, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellisicky/2020/10/03/how-donald-trump-took-down-bonwit-teller-a-fifth-avenue-landmark/

"The Bonwit Teller Building," lostarchitecture, Instagram, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DUAi9K7CAjz/?img_index=1

"Trump Tower," Wikipedia,  last edited on 14 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower

"2cm Breccia Pernice Honed 78" x 115"," Royal Stone, 2024, https://www.royalstonela.com/blog/breccia-pernice-italian-marble-honed/

The first Modern Architecture?

Harlem Fire Watchtower (1857), Marcus Garvey Park, New York. Photo by Sebastian Sinisterra.

Harlem Fire Watchtower in 1857.

All along the watchtower,

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went,

Barefoot servants too.

Outside, in the distance,

A wildcat did growl.

Two riders were approaching.

The wind began to howl.

— Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding, 1967

Princely vigilance over the neighborhood and sounding the alarm to summon the fire horses and riders to put out the wildfires common in mid-19th-century New York required a fireproof building technology and material that enabled a watchtower to be erected quickly, safely, and relatively inexpensively, which the conventional brick, brownstone, stone, and wood that had built the city up till then couldn't quite do.

Harlem Fire Watchtower. Photo by Jim Henderson.

I'm always on the lookout for older buildings that were ahead of their time in some way, breaking with building conventions to invent a new vocabulary that reflected new materials of their eras, influenced the future of architecture, and remains in common use today. The most foresighted of such structures I can think of is the Harlem Fire Watchtower, aka the Mount Morris Fire Watchtower, in Marcus Garvey Park. (It looks kind of like one of those 20th-century oil-tank towers on the spindly legs you sometimes spot on the highway, doesn't it? That's what makes it so ahead of its time! Erected c.1856 by Julius H. Kroehl as one of 11 cast-iron watchtowers from a simple octagonal design by cast-iron trailblazer James Bogardus, this 47-foot tower was perched on what was then called Mount Morris, giving volunteer round-the-clock watchmen a lookout to watch for the first signs of fires in the city. 

These bird's-eye-view fire towers were much in demand in the fire prevention movement resulting from New York's Great Fire of 1835 and the burning down of its wooden watchtowers. The city's fire prevention also included building and engineering the Croton Aqueduct and reservoir network to transport an ample supply of water throughout the city. 

Harlem Fire Watchtower. Photo by Sebastian Sinisterra.

The technological simplicity of the towers made them adaptable to electric telegraphs to further automate the fire alarm system. But the advent of fire-alarm pull-boxes, advanced firehouse alarm systems, and taller buildings in general (especially in a skyscraper-driven place like New York!) made the watchtowers obsolete.

Community activism preserved Harlem's watchtower as a colossal monument to early fire vigilance in the city and a recognizable, lovable icon of Harlem.

The original King's Chapel and the beacon on Sentry Hill in 17th-century Boston.

Of course, the hilltop watchtower concept was not as new as Bogardus' patented cast-iron construction method. It dated back as early as 17th-century Boston, when the 150-foot-high Sentry Hill, the tallest of the three Trimount peaks of the Shawmut Peninsula, was crowned with a tall beacon pole supported by triangular braces and holding a pot of flammable pitch at its top. The watchman mounted the pole's rungs to light up the pot to warn the townsfolk about approaching pirate ships or other undesirable sea-intruders, by decree of the General Court in 1635: 

“…  there shall be forthwith a beacon sett on the centry hill at Boston, to give notice to the country of any danger.”  Though there was no record of the beacon ever being lit before it deteriorated or blew down in a high wind, it gave the hill its present name, Beacon Hill.

Edward Laing Stores Building (1848-49, James Bogardus), Murray & Greenwich streets, 1971, shortly before dismantling.

Edward Laing Stores Building (1848-49, James Bogardus), 1851 print.

When hired to design the new network of 11 New York fire watchtowers, James Bogardus was already a pioneer in cast-iron construction as a speedier way to erect buildings in half the time of a conventional masonry structure, owing to mass-production of cast-iron parts in factories. He demonstrated this in his Edward Laing Stores Building, the first cast-iron building and first self-supporting iron-walled structure in the U.S., in 1848-49.

Photo by Stefano Spolverini.

This, combined with the patent Bogardus had taken out on cast-iron construction, qualified him best to design the new fire watchtowers. This time emphasizing cast-iron as a core structural element rather than the combined structural and decorative one of his cast-iron buildings, he made it a prototype for the steel-frame construction of whole buildings that was a staple of Modernism in architecture and continues to be a standard today.

The tower's cast-iron members had to be stacked and joined together in a post-and-lintel structure within an octagonal footprint for a stronger in-the-round durability and a 360-degree lookout view of the city, in an era when the skyscraper was yet to be invented in Chicago after its 1871 Great Fire. Bracing, ties, and a spiral staircase reinforced the watchtower structure, in addition to providing the watchman's egress to the top balcony perch to allow him a clear view of the first signs of a fire in the distance. 

Architect Angel Ayón, AIA, of AYON Studio in New York, described the watchtower structure best: "“It is an open cast iron structure composed of three tiers of fluted columns superimposed on each other. A smaller eight-sided open lantern at the top served as an observation booth to protect the volunteer watchmen from adverse weather. A large bronze bell hangs from the crossed trusses at the second floor level. A spiral cast iron stairway sweeps upward, adding a graceful curve to the otherwise linear, octagonal composition. … the slender, fluted columns have bases and Doric capitals…”

The fluted Doric columns show a lack of readiness to renounce the Classical cosmetics of the times for the next century's bare-bones Modernism. The bell, cast by Jones & Hitchcock of Troy, N.Y., but replaced in 1865 by a 5-ton bell cast by E.A. & G.R. Meneeley of West Troy, was hung centrally for ease of ringing and clearer sound travel to more fire stations through a specially coded sequence of peals.

"Sous la Tour Eiffel." Photo by Jebulon.

Many see the Eiffel Tower in Paris as the first example of Modern Architecture, owing to its iconic familiarity, its innovation in exposed structural engineering by Gustave Eiffel (three years after he engineered the structure of France's gift to New York, the Statue of Liberty), its brief status as the world's tallest building, and its nonstop celebration of tensile wrought-iron structure, bracing and cross-bracing tourists plainly observe as they rise in its elevators, promenade along its skywalks, and gawk at its monumental power on the Parisian skyline. 

Erected as the cynosure of the Exposition Universelle de 1889 celebrating the centennial of La Révolution Française, the Eiffel Tower was intended as a living symbol of "[n]ot only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude," in Gustave Eiffel's words. Since then it has been known as la dame de fer ("Iron Lady") for its lithe, lacy gracefulness of structural expression.

But James Bogardus was three decades ahead of Gustave Eiffel in the use of iron as the underlying structure of architecture to build it faster and cheaper yet stronger, and in a way that was more celebratory of its structure, function and landscape presence. Which makes his Harlem Fire Watchtower truly the first Modern Architecture.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Drueding, Meghan, "All Along the Watchtower: Saving a Harlem Landmark," Preservation Magazine, Winter 2020, https://savingplaces.org/stories/all-along-the-watchtower-saving-a-harlem-landmark

Dylan, Bob, "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan Newsletter, copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music, from the album John Wesley Harding, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/

"Edward Laing Stores," Wikipedia,  last edited on 16 March 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Laing_Stores

"Excellence Award Spotlight: Fire Watchtower at Marcus Garvey Park," Preservation League of NYS, November 13, 2020, https://www.preservenys.org/blog/excellence-award-spotlight-fire-watchtower-at-marcus-garvey-park

"Harlem Fire Watchtower," Wikipedia, last edited on 26 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Fire_Watchtower

"Harlem Fire Watchtower: Community Engagement and Preservation," CyArk, https://www.cyark.org/projects/harlem-fire-watchtower/in-depth

"Harlem Fire Watchtower Restored," The New York Landmarks Conservancy, https://nylandmarks.org/news/harlem-fire-watchtower-restored/

"James Bogardus," Wikipedia, last edited on 29 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bogardus#cite_note-Winters2012-1

"James Bogardus Factory," cultureNOW: museum without walls, https://culturenow.org/site/james-bogardus-factory

Kaplan, Aline, "Beacon Hill and Ashburton Park – 1," The Next Phase Blog: Social Commentary and Informed Opinions, May 28, 2024, https://aknextphase.com/beacon-hill-ashburton-park/

Kornfeld, Robert, "Project: Harlem Fire Watchtower," Thornton Tomasetti, 2019, https://www.thorntontomasetti.com/project/harlem-fire-watchtower

"Marcus Garvey Park: Mount Morris Fire Watchtower," NYC Parks, Official Website of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/marcus-garvey-park/highlights/6497

"Mount Morris Fire Watchtower," The New York Landmarks Conservancy, https://nylandmarks.org/explore-ny/mount-morris-fire-watchtower/

Reconcilable differences

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus (1970, Bernhard Pfau), Düsseldorf, Germany. Photo by Joe Shoe.

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Photo by Wuppertaler.

Few Modernist architects were as diametrically opposed in design philosophy and building technique as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Corbu conceived architecture as the generator of a "machine for living," sculpting its forms in concrete as an economical alternative to stone and an affordable medium of mass production.

Guggenheim Museum (1959, Frank Lloyd Wright), New York. Photo by Ajay Suresh.

Wright, however, shaped his later designs to reflect nature's forms, contours and substances, tapping into the natural resources and shapes of his building materials to exhibit nature's power to improve the way we live, to create memorable living, working, schooling, theater and art exhibition spaces, and, essentially, to demonstrate all nature offers us for building our social shelters and institutions.

Interior, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Photo by Evan Amos.

Wright's groundbreaking Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1959), for instance, draws on the helix of the nautilus shell to create a curvilinear continuity in the viewing of art inside, swirling a ramp around a central atrium under an expansive skylight designed to distribute natural sunlight equally to all the paintings and sculptures exhibited along the ramp. The aim was for visitors to take an elevator to the top of the ramp and gradually walk down it while viewing the art in a logical or chronological continuity

These opposing forces find a surprisingly happy medium in Germany's Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus – or D'HAUS for short. Built in 1970 from a Modernist design by Bernhard Mathäus Pfau, it is the largest spoken-word theatre in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia region.

Photo by Christoph Schroeter.

Which gives it ample space for its 50-strong ensemble of thespians and 350 "tech" people – set designers and builders, lighting designers and technicians, costume designers, makeup specialists – presenting about 900 productions annually, which the vast, fluid open-concept spaces make possible due to the ingenious design principles of the two master builders Pfau drew on.

Villa Savoye (1930, Le Corbusier), Poissy, France. Photo by Valueyou (talk)

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus from above. Photo by Sebastian Hoppe.

The concrete sculpture and ground-floor piloti support of Corbu's Villa Savoye in France and the dramatic swirls, curved corners and stacked levels of Wright's Guggenheim Museum work wonders together to form a building that serves as a monument to the drama – and the space – we're about to experience inside.

Looking into the lobby of the Schauspielhaus. Photo by Marcin Otulak.

As in Corbu's Villa Savoye, the pilotis create an open-shelter first floor that gives us a sneak preview of the structural drama in store for us as we walk into the lobby. The first floor also shelters us from the elements, as the union between inside and outside that both Corbu and Wright sought in architecture, in their own ways.

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus interior. Photo by Marcin Otulak.

The exposed concrete structural members in the lobby themselves are a sight to be seen, as if organically bursting out of their supporting column of origin like the branches of a tree. Wrightian nature-based organicity and columnar support and Corbusian concrete construction work in concert to create an open-concept space that doesn't depend on a lot of columns to support itself.

Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf, reception area. Photo by Sebastian Hoppe.

In fact, the explosion of concrete ribs – derivative of rib-vaulting in a Gothic cathedral – expresses both the drama in the theater and the festive movement of the guests as they mill around and chat at intermission or before or after a performance. The motion of architecture and the motion of its users form a dramatic harmony in the space.

Interior, Johnson Wax Headquarters (1936-1950, Frank Lloyd Wright).
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress.

This recalls the workroom of Wright's Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, supported by concrete columns encompassing steel mesh cores and topped by "calyxes," or hollow pads with rings and struts, which Wright called "petals." This structure enables each column to carry loads of up to 7,000 lbs. per square inch, and to sculpturally fill the space with the elegance of lily pads.

Photo by Marco Susani.

Similarly, in the Schauspielhaus, Corbu's pilotis and Wright's organic columns cooperate to form a far-reaching continuity of space (as the façade's exterior curves freely express) by distributing their load-bearing capacities far and wide, each fulfilling a proper role in load distribution where necessary. This frees up ramps and stairs to usher minimally obstructed user passage among levels.

Photo by Robert Gassenhofer.

Photo by Kira.

Note how the polarity between Corbu's pilotis and Wright's organic columns resolves itself in a yin-yang harmony of proper weight distribution. 

This allows for more and longer ramps, stairs and mezzanines to lead guests toward the many different theaters in the complex, while allowing for crowd overflow for each of them, in a ubiquitous dance of curvilinearity that parallels the terpsichorean delight of the performances themselves. 

This open-ended, open-concept layout also grants the guests maximum visibility of the complex as a whole, so that the stairs, the ramps, and the spaces they create serve as a visual map from one destination to another. 

The soft lighting, the red-orange carpeting, and the paneling cooperate to create a serene space that is easy on the eyes, to ease guests into the darkened theater, or to help them adjust to the light after a performance. 

The lighting is also theatrically festive, exhilarating audiences with a "Broadway lights" effect.

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus (1970, Bernhard Mathäus Pfau), Düsseldorf, Germany. Photo by Bernhard Pfau.

Which reaches its fullest effect at night, when the external red lights go on, giving guests the equivalent of a red-carpet welcome to an evening in the theater. (Believe it or not, this is roughly how Wright wanted to treat the Guggenheim Museum's exterior – in the "Cherokee Red" of the Johnson Wax Headquarters floor, in his declaration that "red is the color of creation." However, this color scheme was rejected by both Solomon R. Guggenheim and his art adviser Hilla Rebay – perhaps because they feared it would draw too much attention to the building itself, and not blend it well with the prevalent light cast-stone and buff-brick of Fifth Avenue. After all, they were building a very radical, box-breaking building, so they couldn't overdo it. But the red-orange carpeting in the Schauspielhaus is a fitting enough tribute to Wright's use of color as a grounding element, as in the Johnson Wax workroom.)

Photo by Hplar Gillih.

On that note, let's raise a glass and drink a toast to the two master builders who, in a way, made the success of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus possible, through a posthumous reconciliation of their design differences. 

As much of an organic sculpture as it is a machine for living, these normally opposing forces together created a dramatic visual tension in the building that physically embodies the drama presented inside, as well as the drama of audience excitement at seeing a new production and having a lot to say about it afterward.

A toast to Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Bernhard Pfau!

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Düsseldorf Playhouse," Theater der Zeit, https://tdz.de/spielort/duesseldorfer-schauspielhaus

"Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus," Wikipedia, last edited on 18 March 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCsseldorfer_Schauspielhaus

"Johnson Wax Headquarters," Wikipedia, last edited on 4 November 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Wax_Headquarters

McLaughlin, Katherine, and Stefanie Waldek, "13 Things You Didn’t Know About New York City’s Guggenheim Museum," Architectural Digest, July 6, 2026, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/13-things-you-didnt-know-about-new-york-citys-guggenheim-museum

"Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum," brutalbasil, Instagram, October 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/Dew9lfmiszj/?dlrf=MTMydGc4YmNibWxnZA%3D%3D&img_index=1

"Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum," Wikipedia, last edited on 15 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum

"Villa Savoye," Wikipedia, last edited on 19 July 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Savoye

A masterpiece from the minds of mediocrities

This Instagram image of a cable-suspended spiral ramp took me by surprise – not so much for the design, but for the designers, who were so known for modernist mediocrity in architecture that it was hard to believe they could come up with something as ingenious as this. 

They happened to be Charles Luckman, notorious for ruining Boston's cityscape with the Prudential Tower in 1964, and William R. Pereira, for doing the same to San Francisco's skyline with the Transamerica Pyramid in 1972.

Completed before both of those skyscraper bombs, this sculpturally inspired aluminum ramp floating over a dark reflecting pool from its forest of delicate vertical tension cables suspended from the ceiling was designed for Convair Astronautics (General Dynamics) in Kearny Mesa, San Diego, in 1958, as a symbol of the aerospace industry's pursuit of weightlessness in space.

Look at that, and look at these: The sculptural flourish and floating buoyancy of the ramp is replaced by the immutably bland boxiness of the Prudential Tower (left) and the triangular elongation of the Transamerica Pyramid (right). Both show total disregard for the historic neighborhoods and skylines they "came from another planet" to settle into, serving merely to promote their respective life insurance companies with eye-catching iconography the insurers will be remembered for, with no attempt to blend with their cities' architectural traditions.

By contrast to the superficial symbolism of the towers, the ramp richly symbolizes its company's space-travel goals by creating a sculptural floating-in-air impression in the lobby, even inviting visitors to partake of the show by walking up the 5-inch-thick ramp from the lobby to the executive offices, and feeling virtually weightless, as opposed to taking elevators up the towers to get bird's-eye views.

The ramp's role at Convair was symbolic rather than practical. Built to develop the Atlas Missile – the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in the U.S., which sent the Mercury astronauts into space – the plant displayed the ramp to promote its ongoing development of gravity-defying aerospace engineering and space travel, not as anything for the "House of the Future."

Unfortunately, Luckman & Pereira's engineering triumph is no longer there. It was demolished in 1997, along with the General Dynamics plant when the end of the Cold War and decline in defense spending closed the facility, to make way for a residential and commercial complex. While their skyscraper disasterpieces continue to mar the Boston and San Fran skylines, their spectacular spiral ramp is preserved only in photography, as a reminder to us about what middling minds can do once they are properly applied.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

"Cable suspended ramps/stairs," Eng-Tips.com Engineering Forums, November 2, 2018, https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/cable-suspended-ramps-stairs.445924/

"Defying gravity within a corporate lobby," Archinerds, Instagram, October 29, 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DfFh--ekXfI/?obrf=NGw4cDF1aHh5NWRi

Leslie, Stuart W., "Spaces of the Space Age," Smithsonian Magazine, August 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spaces-of-the-space-age-332231/

"Pereira & Luckman – General Dynamics," ChronoPoints, January 4, 2020, https://chronopoints.eecs.ucf.edu/2020/01/04/gd_kearny_mesa/

"Prudential Center (Boston)," Wikipedia,  last edited on 30 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_Center_(Boston)

"Transamerica Pyramid," Wikipedia,  last edited on 16 October 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transamerica_Pyramid

"William L. Pereira and Charles Luckman completed the Convair Astronautics Plant in San Diego, California, USA, in 1958," Archinerds, Instagram, October 2026, https://www.instagram.com/p/DezZjfzig7y/