1961 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Scranton, Pa.-born Canadian social critic Jane Jacobs (née Butzner), 45, observes that cities were safer and more pleasant when they consisted of neighborhood communities, where people lived in relatively low-priced buildings, knew their neighbors, and lived in the streets and on their doorsteps rather than in the depersonalized environment characteristic of modern cities. Critic Lewis Mumford, 65, notes that congested 18th-century cities were hardly safer or healthier.

New York adopts a new zoning resolution that permits buildings to contain a maximum of 12 times as much floor space as the area of the original site with special bonuses for enlightened land use (see 1916: the Equitable Building of 1915 contained nearly 30 times as much floor space as was contained in its land site). Chief effect of the new resolution will be to encourage architects to set off their buildings with open plazas.

New York's Chase Manhattan Bank building is completed in lower Manhattan to designs by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; the 60-story glass-and-aluminum tower gives the financial district its first open plaza.

Century City goes up on a 180-acre site in west Los Angeles formerly owned by Twentieth Century Fox studios. Aluminum Corp. of America (Alcoa) pursues a grandiose scheme for a city within a city that will provide homes for 12,000 with office and retail space for 20,000, a scheme projected by New York real estate operator William Zeckendorf Jr., 56.

London's 500-foot Post Office Tower (later British Telecom Tower) is completed in the heart of the city, changing its skyline. Designed by Ministry of Public Building and Works chief architect Eric Bedford, 51, the upper floors of the telecommunications tower are left uncovered, exposing antennae that carry microwave telephone links. Two observation platforms and a revolving restaurant top the structure (the platforms will close in 1971 following a bomb explosion and the restaurant will close in 1980).

Architect Eero Saarinen dies of a brain tumor at Ann Arbor, Mich., September 1 at age 51.