Architecture: Skyscraper, Oil and Light
Read my newest article on Chicago’s Standard Oil Building
With this article about a mid-American lakefront skyscraper once sheathed in marble, I introduced a new story series for Classic Chicago magazine. With my editorial approval, I titled the series Industrial Revolutions. The focus of the story is design, architecture and the tall, white building’s history, including its origins as a monument to an American oil company, the leftist/nationalist terrorist attack and the tower’s similarity to New York City’s downed twin towers (1973-2001).
Autonomia readers know or may recall that I write about architecture. Besides this week’s magazine profile of the Standard Oil Building, I’ve written about Pittsburgh skyscrapers —such as the Arrott Building and the Oliver Building—and interviewed designers, architects and builders from Trammell Crow’s CEO to Dion Neutra, Richard Neutra’s architect son, whom I met and interviewed for hours at his Los Angeles office before he died. Recently, during commercial work-for-hire, I interviewed a senior police officer about crime prevention through lighting design at the Beverly Hills Police Department headquarters for one of my editorial clients.
I interviewed George W. Bush in an LA skyscraper. I interviewed Steve Forbes at the Forbes Building in New York City. I interviewed John McCain in a San Francisco skyscraper. From admiring Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which begins in an Ohio valley and ends with a rising skyscraper scene in Manhattan, to touring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock, Ennis and Oak Park, Illinois houses and Taliesin, Taliesin West and Fallingwater as well as dancing at the top of LA’s US Bank tower and remembering my dad for Father’s Day with a visit to his office at the Standard Oil Building, architecture influences and affects my work and life.
I’m seeding the art of architecture into my fiction. May new industrial revolutions thrive. This new intellectual’s writing as fast as—and doing the best—I can.
