Beauty, novel and tragedy of the best skyscraper in New York

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• LUIS ALEMANY

  Madrid

Updated Saturday,27May2023-23:14

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Throughout The Glass Storm, the first novel by architect Pedro Torrijos (Ediciones B), there are 26 quotes from William Shakespeare that are like secret clues to understand the book. What is Shakespeare's theatre if not a way of portraying men's longings for greatness, first as something ridiculous and then from compassion? That's also what The Crystal Storm is all about. "Note that all quotations belong to Shakespeare's tragedies, not to comedies: Lear, La

tempest, Othello, The Merchant of Venice

and

", clarifies Torrijos. "And of

only one line comes out: Goodbye, goodbye, remember me."

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"Goodbye, goodbye remember me" is what Hugh Stubbins and William LeMessurier, the failed heroes of

, after sliding

. The characters of Torrijos are the architect and the engineer, both real, who designed and built in the 70s the most sensational building in New York of his time, the

. His case, well documented, is studied in all schools of architecture in the world.

What was heroic and tragic about this project? Your starting hypothesis.

And it was occupied by a Lutheran church, impoverished but proud. His congregation refused to leave his home, nor for all the gold in the world, but agreed to sell his air rights to his banker neighbors, who longed for that property to install their new plant. Stubbins and LeMessurier were commissioned to build a floorless skyscraper there.

How's that? "Air rights are the ownership of the air above a building.

. And the neighbor buys them to be able to put windows in the party wall without any future work going to blind them. That is normal, what has been done in Manhattan since the nineteenth century. In Citicorp's case, the rights were used to mount one building on top of the other. CitiCorp did not make its tower on the floor of the church but on its air. It was the first time that one building was mounted on top of the other. Then it's been done a few times, it's relatively frequent."

Stubbins and, above all, LeMessurier act as

In the first half of the book: They achieve the impossible, build a tower of 279 meters on an empty podium 30 meters high, with an impossible foundation, based on four off-center cores. They did it, in addition, in the New York of the 70s, impoverished and violent (and to which the characters of Torrijos are

), and with efficiency criteria unimaginable until then. "They invented the mass damper, which was a formidable idea and is used in many towers today: the idea is that, since the wind is only going to stress the building sometimes, having a structure that permanently protects it is

. LeMessurier invented a structure that turned on and off, that was there only when needed."

But in the greatness of the two heroes was their condemnation: the Citicorp massif had an Achilles heel,

that could lead to its collapse on any stormy day. In short: engineers prepared their tower to withstand headwinds, but

. The Crystal Storm tells the story of the discovery of that mistake and Stubbins and LeMessurier's journey from glory to infamy. And, in the end, it puts a very Shakespearean storm on them as well so that they try to redeem themselves.

"In reality, more than a sin of Icarus, what happened in the case of Citicorp was

. The wind tests were done for frontal gales but that was what the standard required and nobody had done anything else before, "explains Torrijos.

In his novel there are other types of heroes, rather heroines: Diane Hartley, an engineering student, discovered the miscalculation and warned,

, of the disaster that awaited the tower. And Jennifer Longo, an engineer on LeMessurier's team, was the first person to hear Hartley's warning and set out to save the building. Hartley is a real person; Longo, a fiction, a mix between two people who had a role in the real history of Citicorp.

"This is a pure novel based on a true story, not a fictional non-fiction book or a popular book.

," says Torrijos. "Even in real characters, their development is that of a novel. Of LeMessurier there are documentation and interviews, we know that he liked to see himself as a hero and listen to Wagner. But I put a lot of myself into his character. At first I did it unconsciously and then with awareness.

... on another scale. I had a motto: 'Pedro Torrijos is never wrong'. And he said it like that, in the third person."

He continues: "Then I was wrong. It wasn't that serious. Or it was, I don't know, it depends on the person. For me it was a serious trauma. I entered a complicated period, with a

that I learned to control with therapy and pharmacology. I actually started writing this book at that time."

Torrijos is perhaps the greatest popularizer of architecture in Spain in his generation, so the temptation is to see this novel as

. Shakespeare's quotes undo that misunderstanding:

It does not speak of forms, masses, structures or materials. It speaks of human nature with its nooks and crannies.