Concrete Is Beautiful
Wallace Harrison: The Metropolitan Opera House. 1955
Wallace Harrison’s designs for Metropolitan Opera House in 1955 are included on ‘’The New York that might have been built‘’ picture series.
Harrison’s first ideas for the Met were impresive. One of his earliest sketches looked similar to the Sydney Opera House; another presented a wavelike building on stilts above a reflecting pool.
But his most absurd version was surely the Met as a gigantic Roman foot, as you can see on image above, its base resembling a narrow ankle, spreading apart until its toes formed the looping curtain walls that today mark the front of the structure. If this design had been chosen it would surely had been build with concrete shells.
After almost 50 proposals, project patron John D Rockefeller and the board finally accepted the least visionary of them all.
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