Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged architecture →  View Popular

A fantastic landscape in Lower Manhattan — plummeting holes, steep cliffsides and soft billows of steel-gray bedrock, punctuated by thousands of beach-smooth cobblestones in a muted rainbow of reds and purples and greens — has basked in sunlight this summer for the first time in millennia.

This monumental carving was the work of glaciers, which made their last retreat from these parts about 20,000 years ago

“As the ice passed over New Jersey,” Ms. Moss explained, “it picked up local rocks such as red shale and sandstone and gray basalt from the Palisades. As ice melted from the advancing glacier, raging streams of water flowed in front of it. The strong currents picked up the sand, gravel and boulders and carried them downstream across the World Trade Center site.

“As these rocks bounced across the bedrock, essentially sandblasting the surface, the softer layers started to erode out and the harder rock left behind became polished. In places, the water swirled in whirlpools of varying sizes, carving out deep potholes and larger basins.”

Along the east side of the pothole, the rock layers run vertically — not horizontally. The result, where the surface has been carved away in a concave form, is an abstract canvas of swirling, concentric rings; not unlike a gouge in a wall that reveals many layers of old paint.

This speaks of a period far more ancient than the glaciers, about 500 million years ago, when the edges of the colliding North American and African continental plates got shuffled together.

twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,”

The flat cables have made possible much smaller machines, facilitating the proliferation of what are called, rather inelegantly, “machineroomless” elevators. A machine the size of a marmot, rather than of a moose, can be installed in the shaft, rather than in a room of its own, freeing up space for architects and landlords. This is what passes for cutting edge.

The big ideas tend to falter on the laws of physics. A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet. A hoist rope any longer is too heavy to be practical; at thirty-two hundred feet, it will snap, like a stream of spit in a stairwell. A decade ago, Otis developed a prototype of a conveyance called Odyssey, which could slide out of its shaft and travel on a horizontal track to another shaft, with the help of a linear induction motor. It was scuttled by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The rising cost of electricity has confounded other lofty dreams, like the ropeless elevator.

White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator.