"One of the most successful urban schemes in New York in the 1970s, 'Citicorp' brought new life to a downtown Manhattan city block that had been largely filled by a popular but far too big Lutheran Church. It created an exciting new internal plaza for people with shops, restaurants and performance spaces on a number of levels at the base of a rather uninteresting square-format, smooth-faced office tower, chopped off at 45 degrees at the top, ostensibly to facilitate solar collection devices. On the second storey, the old church has found a spacious comfortable new home devoting its services to God and jazz."

— Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History. p346.

"Here's a towering office building that stands out not only because of its diagonal roofline—slanted as if for a solar collector but not bearing one—but also because of the popular appeal of The Market, its 7-story atrium entered at street level and designed for leisurely shopping, eating, and browsing. Built on the site of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, Citicorp shares its space with that congregation's new quarters also designed by Stubbins."

— from Sylvia Hart Wright. Sourcebook of Contemporary North American Architecture: From Postwar to Postmodern. p135.

"Changes during construction led to a finished product that was structurally unsound. In 1978, prompted by a question from a student, LeMessurier discovered a potentially fatal flaw in the building's construction: the skyscraper's bolted joints were too weak to withstand 70-mile-per-hour (113 km/h) wind gusts at specific angles.

"While LeMessurier's original design and load calculations for the special, uniquely-designed 'chevron' load braces used to support the building were based on welded joints, a labor and cost-saving change altered the joints to bolted construction after the building's plans were approved.

"For the next three months, a construction crew welded two-inch-thick steel plates over each of the skyscraper's 200 bolted joints during the night, after each work day, almost unknown to the general public."

— Citicorp Center article at Wikipedia

The Creator's Words

"I think of architecture not as individual buildings but as the whole fabric of our physical environment. Architecture is the man-made world in its totality. It is everything we have built around us - our cities, our suburbs, our sidewalks, highways, buildings, parks, signs, street-lighting, right down to the houses we live in, and the chairs we sit in - all our physical aids to living."

— Hugh Stubbins. from Paul Heyer. Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America. p217.

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