ORAL HISTORY of D. STANTON KORISTA Interviewed by Betty J

ORAL HISTORY OF D. STANTON KORISTA

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv

Outline of Topics vi

Oral History 1

Selected References 280

Biographical Profile 282

Appendix: Technical Publications 284

Index of Names and Buildings 288

iii

PREFACE

In his own words, Stan Korista describes his mission as director of structural and civil engineering at SOM, "I make sure the plans we make allow for a structurally sound building. I also make sure that our plans are being followed on the construction site. I consider it a sort of moral responsibility to make sure it's built right."

It is this commitment to high quality architecture and engineering that Korista has practiced throughout his 43-year career at SOM. A quick glance at his CV reveals a rich and varied career with projects that include cutting-edge super tall structures in locations worldwide; master planning; medical, academic, transportation and sports facilities. Stan appreciates the career he has had constructing challenging super tall structures and working with the foremost SOM designers of the day. Further, Stan has been a prolific writer of technical papers, often with colleagues, that he and others presented at conferences.

Korista is licensed in forty-one states as well as in the European Union and the United Kingdom. To record Korista's voluminous memories of his forty-three years at SOM, we met in a conference room at The Art Institute of Chicago on February 4, 5, 11, and 12, 2009 where we tape-recorded seven and one/half hours of Stan's recollections on five ninety-minute cassettes. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Stan's original narrative, and has been reviewed for accuracy and clarity by both Stan and me.

Published material that I found helpful in my preparation of this interview is appended to this document. It was Stan's wish to also include a list of some of the technical papers he wrote and/or authored with colleagues that were delivered at conferences and/or were published (Appendix, p. 284). This oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a downloadable version from the Chicago Architects Oral History Project web page, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm4/index_caohp.php?CISOROOT=/caohp

Thanks go to many people whose contribution has been essential to the completion of this document. First, my sincere appreciation goes to Stanton Korista for his willingness to share his personal and professional memories with candor and thoughtfulness of the

iv people, issues and events he experienced while at SOM. To those at SOM who generously supported Korista's oral history, we are grateful, especially to Craig Hartman, who has been our liaison throughout this undertaking. The staff at SOM deserve thanks for their prompt and efficient assistance, especially that of Maria Nano, who worked with Stan to develop the list of technical papers, Karen Widi who gave me access to a few publications from the SOM library; as well as the library staff at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries: Amy Ballmer, Melanie Emerson, and Susan Augustine with the helpful direction of Mary Woolever, Art and Architecture Archivist, and Jack Brown, Director of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Essential to processing this document in its many phases has been the cooperation of Donna Forrest, Michal Schwartz and Sanna Evans in the Copy Center at the Art Institute of Chicago, for which we are appreciative. Last but not least, we are grateful for the contribution of our transcriber, Kathy Zvanovec who, with her careful handling, transformed this document from tape to type.

Betty J. Blum September 2009

OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Why Stan Became an Engineer 2 Study at Bradley University 4 Study and Research at University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana 8 Various Jobs 10 Mentors and Heroes 13 At SOM: Working With Several Design Architects 16 Work With Myron Goldsmith 32 Social Issues of the Sixties 42, 50 Developers 47 Another Project With Myron Goldsmith 51 Projects With Walter Netsch 56 Outdoor Sculpture 71 University of Illinois, Chicago Campus and Other Projects 85 Work With Bruce Graham on Projects Worldwide 98 Work With Adrian Smith in Boston 131 New Technology: Using the Computer 144 A Fabric Roof Structure in Minneapolis 163 The Influence of Fazlur Khan 171 Large Projects 173 Where to Next for SOM? 174 More About Computers 178 A Bit of History 180 The Institute for Architecture and Urbanism 187 How SOM Handled the Slump of the Early 1990s 195 Competition for a Tower To Be Built in Shanghai 198 Historic Preservation 200 Green Architecture 204 The Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai 207 Trump Tower in Chicago 233 Another Competition: the Burj Dubai with Adrian Smith 256

Pearl River Tower: a Very Green Building 264 Looking Back 270 Advice to Next Generation of Engineers 274 How Shall We Remember Stan Korista? 276

vii

D. STANTON KORISTA

Blum: In his own words, Stan Korista describes his work at SOM, when he was

director of structural and civil engineering: “I make sure the plans we make

allow for a structurally sound building. I also make sure that our plans are

being followed on the construction site. I consider it a sort of moral

responsibility to make sure it’s built right.” This is the commitment to quality

architecture and engineering that Stan Korista has practiced throughout his

forty-three year career at SOM. A quick glance at his CV reveals a rich and

varied career, with projects that include cutting-edge super tall structures in

worldwide locations; master planning; medical, academic, transportation,

and sports facilities. Korista is licensed in forty-one states as well as the

European Union and the United Kingdom. His memories of forty-three years

at SOM, in the second half of the twentieth century, is what we’re here today

to record. Today is February 4, 2009, and I’m with Mr. D. Stanton Korista in a

conference room in Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute. What

does the D stand for?

Korista: D stands for a word in Czechoslovakian which is Dromher, probably there’s

not another one of those in the world.

Blum: Was that a given name?

Korista: That was a given name, a family name.

Blum: D-R-O-M-E-R? [spells]

Korista: D-R-O-H-M-E-R. [spells]

Blum: I see, but you use the initial on your official papers.

Korista: I use the initial, but basically I go by Stan.

Blum: That’s how I’ve heard others refer to you, as Stan. Why did you select the

field of architecture, with a focus on engineering, for your life's work?

Korista: Because as I grew up I always was interested in building things. When I was

in high school I lived on my grandparents' farm, and we built several barns

and sheds, and it just got me interested in building. And I learned in high

school, being interested in science and math, that civil engineers tend to build

things.

Blum: What did you think civil engineers did?

Korista: I thought civil engineers were the ones responsible for bridges, for buildings,

for dams, and all those things sounded like outdoor activities, which I loved,

and it was also building things.

Blum: When you were a child, if you can remember back that far, did you play with

blocks, Lincoln Logs, toys that you could build with?

Korista: I'm sure I did. Although I don't have great things, my greatest memory was

when I was in the latter part of grade school and high school and building

barns on a small farm southwest of Chicago.

Blum: Did you know what architecture was all about?

Korista: I knew what architecture generally was, but certainly when I was an

undergraduate, I didn't have a good grasp of architecture and the integration

of architecture and what finally turned out to be structural engineering. This

is only one of many categories of what's called civil engineering.

Blum: What did your father do?

Korista: My father actually worked in an office, business management in a banking

institution here in Chicago.

Blum: And your mother, did she work outside the home?

Korista: My mother was an elementary school teacher.

Blum: Did you have any mentors who encouraged you in the direction you thought

you wanted to go?

Korista: I would have to say that probably there were mentors more in the science

and math areas in high school, in chemistry and physics. When I went to

college, I pretty much wanted to take it upon myself to get into… civil

engineering? I didn't know, particularly, civil engineers or do we have any in

our family. It was just the act of being actively involved in building new

things.

Blum: You said you did not have any model to follow who was close to you.

Korista: No. I followed my own star, I guess.

Blum: When you were ready to select a college, why did you select Bradley

University [Peoria, Illinois]?

Korista: Bradley University was a mid-size, Midwestern school. I'm sure if my parents

were here they'd say it had something to do with cost, like today. It had a

school of engineering, which for a mid-size university was certainly not very

common at that point. There was probably, other than the large state schools,

only two or three in the Midwest that actually offered undergraduate

engineering curriculum.

Blum: The University of Illinois surely did.

Korista: Yeah, outside of the major state universities, but the other State of Illinois

schools did not. Of the private schools in Illinois there was IIT [Illinois

Institute of Technology] and Bradley, they were the only ones at that time

that offered undergraduate engineering. Now Northwestern was… I include

that in the large University of Illinois school type of thing.

Blum: But you went to Bradley and this was between, let's see, 1956…

Korista: 1958 to 1962.

Blum: Oh, 1958, I can't read my own writing. In 1962 you graduated with a

bachelor's in civil engineering.

Korista: Yes, that's correct.

Blum: And that was from the School of Industrial Engineering?

Korista: It was just called the College of Engineering.

Blum: I see. What was the approach of the school? Was it modern? Was it Beaux-

Arts?

Korista: I think that the approach for a smaller Midwestern, mid-size university was

to give the students an undergraduate level of engineering. Just a good,

broad, basic understanding of engineering, so they were prepared to go out

and work, but it wasn't necessarily specifically in any particular sub-area. So

in civil engineering, you got some roadway design, some bridge design,

some building design, and then just all the basics. And in the same way with

the physics and math, you got good, broad basics there. You also had a few

courses in electrical engineering or mechanical engineering, which kind of at

least introduced you to different types of mechanical engineering and

different types of electrical engineering. So it was good broad-brush

engineering at a basically liberal arts university.

Blum: Was there any design included in your curriculum?

Korista: There was engineering design. Again, they did not have and they still don't

have a college of architecture. This was a school of engineering, so basically

you did engineering design problems. It could be for a roadway or a

building, but certainly it wasn't focused at buildings.

Blum: Did you use computers in the classroom?

Korista: Oh no, that was pre-computer.

Blum: What were some of the texts you were working with?

Korista: Texts? They were the texts that were up to date for that period of time.

Blum: Would a writer like Carl Condit have been on your list of books to read?

Korista: Probably not, no. And unfortunately, one of the things that many schools still

have today in their undergraduate program for engineers is they tend to, I

believe, to force too many engineering courses and not enough liberal arts

courses.

Blum: Was there any history of engineering, history of art or architecture? Was that

included?

Korista: No. This was really, really a real engineering school, so you learned about

engineering and you were learning the basics of engineering. They were not

set up, necessarily, to look at the––not that I wouldn't have liked it now that I

know what it is––but they weren't set up for the historical and so forth. I

think it was when I went on and had an opportunity for going on from there

to a master's degree in structural engineering at the University of Illinois in

Champaign, where they had a lot of it. At that point in time, University of

Illinois at Champaign in structural engineering was probably the top school

with maybe the University of California at Berkeley at that time. They had

many, many of the front runners in structural engineering for buildings and

roadways, but especially buildings, which is what I was interested in by then.

So a lot of the name authors and researchers happened to be there from mid-

fifties to mid-seventies. I happened to be there from 1962 to 1964.

Blum: Did you have any project or thesis to complete at Bradley?

Korista: At Bradley there was no requirement of thesis.

Blum: Was there one at the University of Illinois?

Korista: At the University of Illinois I was an engineering research assistant, which

basically was your project there and in this case I was working for projects

basically with Chicago Bridge and Iron. I was doing research, and then you

had to report the research. In essence it was a thesis, probably bordering on

almost a doctoral dissertation.

Blum: Who did you report to? Someone from Chicago Bridge and Iron?

Korista: No, it was actually a professor. Professors down there had research grants

from many places, and Chicago Bridge and Iron was one of them.

Blum: I see.

Korista: We were doing theoretical and experimental studies of very large circular

cylindrical shapes that they actually used. They did a lot of pen stock work,

which are the big tubes that come out of the back side of the dams where the

water comes out as it runs down. They were interested in the various

behaviors of these. So most of the work was in that area. I did some other

research work also, so it was very enjoyable because besides just the course

work, you get to know certain professors and doctoral students very much

more than if you were just a student only taking courses.

Blum: Were there any students that you still know from school days?

Korista: Oh sure. Sure.

Blum: Any at SOM?

Korista: Not at SOM, but before I was down there [Champaign Urbana], Fazlur Khan

was down there in the mid-fifties and he got his Ph.D. Hal Iyengar was down

there in the late-fifties and followed a program similar to what I was doing.

He spent a couple of years as a research assistant on other things, but he

started on his Ph.D. program as well. And that's what I also did. I was not

down there when either of them was there, but I did the same kind of thing. I

got the master's and started on a Ph.D. program, but by that time I was

married and we had some young children, and very honestly the financial

portion of that said it's time to go to work.

Blum: Oh, so you got your master's and you went to work instead of completing

your Ph.D.?

Korista: Right.

Blum: Did you have any evening or summer work before you graduated?

Korista: I kind of worked full-time. The research assistant job required so many hours

a week, because it required like twenty hours a week. Then you had your

course work, and then to keep the money flowing I did work for a couple of

consulting engineers. What was available, or what I found available was

actually doing surveying work. So while I was doing the graduate studies in

structural engineering, I was still doing another part of civil engineering

which was surveying, on weekends. So it was interesting. You learned more

about construction and the fact that geometry and dimensions are very

important when you're building things.

Blum: So you did have some experience. You weren't just a student fresh out of

school.

Korista: And when I was going to undergraduate school, I worked three summers

with the Illinois Department of Roads. I was out on roadway projects, on

interstate projects for three summers, so that built up some engineering

background also. But that was on roadways, and I did surveying, but at that

point in time I was getting focused towards structural engineering and

basically buildings versus bridges.

Blum: Did architecture come into your mind then?

Korista: No, I still have to say that I had very much of a structural engineering/civil

engineering background, and wasn't until I got involved in the consulting

engineering work. I worked in Peoria, Illinois, one year after U. of I.

graduation. I went back to where Bradley was, worked for a consulting

engineer for one year doing structural engineering design and got to do a lot

of different things: a small school, several water treatment and sewage plants,

all within one year of time. They were working as the consulting engineer

and certainly I then became exposed to architects who were working on those

projects. But I was really looking ahead, and what they were doing was

limited as far as I was concerned, so I came up to Chicago. But basically my

integration with architecture did, in fact, come from joining SOM. I think that

was one of the features that an architectural engineering firm had, that you

could be working with the architects in the beginning, and not just solving

problems at the end.

Blum: Did you know anything about the Chicago School of Architecture?

Korista: I had certainly learned about the Chicago School of Architecture.

Blum: After or before you joined SOM?

Korista: At SOM, being in Chicago, and coming forward on that.

Blum: Did the fact that Chicago had a structural history, attract you at all?

Korista: Certainly. Since I grew up for the first fourteen or fifteen years in Chicago,

certainly I was aware of some of the taller buildings at that time and all the

bridges over the Chicago River. Those things were all of interest to me.

Maybe not quite realizing what part of the interest, but they were certainly

building things, new things, and apparently good things going downstream.

So when I started at SOM I was really an engineer's engineer, but right away,

it was kind of a spark that went off… it was, gee whiz, architecture is how we

all get going on buildings and paid attention.

Blum: Did you have any training in planning?

Korista: Not really, no. You know, I knew what, generally, planning was but not

necessarily architectural planning, because I had one course in

undergraduate school that was called the planning of airfields, airports. It

was really the planning not the engineering of an airport. So the idea of

planning being up front, the idea of planning setting goals and programs, the

idea was there but as far as urban planning, no.

Blum: That's what I meant. You were in school in the early sixties. Was there any

unrest on campus at that time?

Korista: I think I had luckily missed those years.

Blum: Well, but the high point, of course, was 1968.

Korista: I'd say, when I was on the campus, probably at least what was perceived as

the most interesting event on campus was probably the election of John F.

Kennedy as president. That was a difference. I was at Bradley at the time, and

I know he actually came to Peoria and spoke at Bradley while he was

running for president. And at U. of I., I think, it was still kind of the

aftermath of that. Of course, I guess it was the first year I was there that he

was actually assassinated, so that had turmoil. But it was still turmoil just on

the discussion basis of, "What are we doing?" No, in the early sixties I didn't

perceive a lot of the campus unrest.

Blum: So was there a lot of cooperation on campus?

Korista: Oh, generally. I mean, I think in any academic institution you always have

people who are thinking out beyond the box, whether it's a technical subject

or a general subject. But I wouldn't classify that as unrest, that's just thinking

beyond the box.

Blum: Did you have a mentor at the University of Illinois?

Korista: I think it was probably multiple mentors, which were… as I say, I was down

there at a very lucky time in structural engineering, because they had a whole

series of professors that were the mainline professors writing books and

doing research for all of the United States, if not the world. And I had a

chance to have courses with them, like Nathan M. Newmark, who was a very

well-known structural engineer. He was involved in dynamic design; he did

a lot of work for the government on atomic blasts, since we were all

concerned about how do you build shelters for atomic blasts back in that

period of time. Ralph B. Peck was a geotechnical engineer, a professor, and

he was probably the number one in the country as far as geotechnical, which

are the foundations in earth parts of engineering. My actual mentor as far as

the project I was on was Professor Bill Munse, and he was and still is––he's

still alive––in the area of structural steel research, which is all engineering, no

architecture, no buildings, but things like testing of bolted and welded

members that go into buildings. He was doing a lot of testing, actually, for

submarines and steel that was going into submarines. But they were very

well-known in their disciplines. Again, it's engineering: it's civil engineering,

it's structural engineering. It's not like researching a building.

Blum: You wanted to get your hands in there.

Korista: That's what it was all about for me. Actually over the period of years, and it

was actually after I was here at SOM, that there was a period of time when

the University of Illinois was one of the schools that had a curriculum called

architectural engineering, that was in the architecture department. The

people there actually took some engineering courses within the architectural

departments, and they were probably less rigorous than in the civil

engineering department. Now, over the years, we have had a lot of people

that come and join us with an undergraduate degree in architecture and a

master's degree in structural engineering. So there has certainly been

progress in forty years of people that might be interested in that. In other

words, somebody starts out thinking about architecture and then gets

interested in the structural part of it. Now there aren't very many schools

around the country that do that: University of Illinois, Champaign; Penn

State has probably another of the more acclaimed architectural engineering

schools which are separate from the structural engineering or civil

engineering schools.

Blum: You say you learned about the Chicago School of Architecture when you

joined SOM?

Korista: That's going forward, yes, sure.

Blum: What about Mies van der Rohe? When did you learn about Mies?

Korista: Mies had a lot of impact on the architecture that was going on, maybe not just

Miesian but certainly he being a part, at the time, being involved with IIT.

Some of the senior architects or partners that were at SOM at that time

having gone to school there, such as Myron Goldsmith, who again, when I

first joined wasn't a partner, but he was certainly one of the senior designers.

He very quickly tuned you into the somewhat Miesian theory of structures of

simplicity and letting the structure and architecture flow together. I think

that's probably where it started, being more a consideration of those.

Blum: After you graduated, with your master's in hand, you just said you worked

as a consultant for a firm in Peoria for a year. What was the name of that

firm?

Korista: Associated Engineers. I don't know that they even exist anymore.

Blum: Why only a year?

Korista: Because they were a relatively small firm, and because of what they were

doing. I just, I guess, had ideas that I could certainly be involved in bigger

and better things.

Blum: And what were you looking for? What did you have in mind?

Korista: Taller buildings, bigger buildings. Being more involved in the foundation

engineering. Computers were starting to come into play then; some places

could afford to use computers. It was just more, to get more involved.

Blum: And how did you select SOM as the door to knock on?

Korista: I did a lot of reading and came up and interviewed several places. A couple

of them were architectural engineering firms like SOM and a couple of them

were consulting structural engineering firms. SOM really caught my eye as

far as what they were doing currently, what they had done, and just the

whole emphasis of being able to have structural engineering, civil

engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and architecture

kind of all working together.

Blum: Do you remember the exchange coming to their door and telling them you're

available and you're looking for work?

Korista: I don't know if I remember the exact day, but the subject that I was interested

in at that point was certainly structural engineering, and they were doing

buildings. So I'm sure I didn't say I was interested in doing roadways or

dams. I actually did interview Harza Engineering Company who at that time

did a lot of dams and water treatment work. They were very, very large,

worldwide. I did interview them and guessed very quickly I wasn't probably

interested in doing dams; I'd rather do buildings. Really my goal, coming out

of school, I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to do buildings for ten years, to

do bridges for ten years, and to do construction, contractors construction for

ten years and that would be a career. They were all building things. They

were all involved with out-of-doors and not just in the office. So that was

kind of a goal before I became more attuned towards architecture and

structural engineering and buildings. Very honestly, very luckily, I fell into

an era of transition from domestic work to internationalization, and over the

years have been very, very fortunate not only to have worked with a lot of

good architects, but I think I was involved in projects in almost thirty

different states and twenty-seven different countries. And most, I got a

chance to at least go to all those places at least once. So it built into a career

that wasn't fathomable when I was looking to get started in a career.

Blum: Who at SOM hired you?

Korista: A gentleman at that time, which was Al Picardi.

Blum: Was he an engineer?

Korista: He was a structural engineer. So I think when I was there we did walk

downstairs and looked around. I think the only person we bumped into was

Bill Hartmann, because usually when Bill was there he was in the office.

Blum: Was Bill the head of the office at that time?

Korista: He was kind of the head of the office. They had people that were head of…

there was Fred Kraft and Bill Dunlap, and they were probably more of the

project-manager partners. Bill Hartmann got the new jobs, but he was always

kind of respected as the head of the office. At that time Bruce Graham was a

partner and Walter Netsch was a partner. Anyway, we bumped into Bill

Hartmann, shook hands, and he said, "We're looking for a good engineer, so

why don't you just come with us." And I said, "Yeah, okay."

Blum: Who said this to you?

Korista: Bill Hartmann. The other guy, Al Picardi, hired me and we shook hands.

There's this gentleman––what's his name? Oh, Fazlur Khan, he kind of did

one of those stutter steps, but he's over at the other building right now,

because we're actually in more than one office." So Al Picardi had a structural

group in one office, and Faz Khan had just come four years before that and

he kind of had this small structural group in another. SOM was always in a

couple of different offices except for the last ten years.

Blum: So the engineers were not working side by side with the architects.

Korista: Well, no, we were, but there were pods. There was always two pods, Fazlur,

and Myron were sitting over in this office, but they were working on

finishing the Brunswick building.

Blum: Was that Bruce's design?

Korista: No, Myron did the Brunswick building and they were at the beginnings of, or

they were in the design phase of the Hancock Center. And those people,

there was a group of architects and structural engineers in one of the floors in

the Carson Pirie Scott building. The rest of us were down at 30 West Monroe,

which was the main office. We'd have meetings and go back and forth, and

that's how I got to work on––besides working on core projects over here––

one day I had lunch with Fazlur very early on, and he didn't know me but

that was the way to find out. And he thought it would be great if I kind of

wanted to be his guy that would run over to Hancock every now and then

and see how things were going, which was all right with me. That was just

the starting of construction, that's about the time I came. So I didn't do that

on a full-time basis but it got me involved in Hancock as they built the

building, and then we were designing things and we were building things at

the same time.

Blum: Could you describe the office of SOM when you were hired? How large it

was… you spoke about various locations.

Korista: I started in October of 1965, and at that time the main part of the office was at

30 West Monroe in the Inland Steel building, which SOM had completed in

1958. There was a small group working over at Carson Pirie, and they were

working basically on finishing the Brunswick building which was almost

done with construction, and the start of Hancock Center.

Blum: Were you involved with Hancock?

Korista: I was involved in Hancock in the construction period, design not necessarily.

But from the construction on I was involved in the structural engineering

side of it. So that gave me a chance there and then again, one of the things I

always found interesting at SOM, you could work on a lot of different

projects. I'm sure no one worked on as many different projects as I did, but I

found that interesting. So even though it took more time and energy, doing a

variety of things for a variety of different people, that was the interesting

part.

Blum: When you were involved with Hancock, were you using a studio system?

There was Bruce's studio and Walter's studio.

Korista: Yes, but the word studio has evolved many, many times. I think they were

more project teams. There was a team that was doing the Hancock. There was

another team doing a couple of Walter's universities. There was yet another

team doing Myron's work. So it was more of a team basis, but it was a type of

studio. Generally there was a group of structural engineers and architects

that were geographically sitting close to each other, working on a project or a

series of projects. The architects tended to work more specifically on only one

project, while the structural engineer might at the same time, be working on

many. Actually, when I began we were almost doing that. They had me

working on a Bruce Graham project, a Myron Goldsmith project, and a

Walter Netsch project. So…

Blum: Well, it sounds like a unique opportunity to work with several designers.

Korista: It was great.

Blum: What was the difference, say, working on a project of Bruce's as compared

with a project of Walter's?

Korista: I don't, after all this period of time… I don't want to… I'm sure they had

their…

Blum: I know they weren't the best of friends.

Korista: Conceptually they seemed to have different philosophies of what they

wanted to do, but in my time here, Bruce was working on the more

commercial buildings, the high-rise buildings, generally speaking. This is in

my career. Bruce was… where Walter had already spun off and was working

on basically educational and occasionally special projects. But when I started

there, Walter was working at MIT, at University of Illinois, Chicago, and

several smaller colleges, so almost all of his work was in the educational field

at some point in time. Some of it was he was trying to develop, and I never

quite fully understood it, his Field Theory for education that went beyond

architecture. But he spent a lot of time in discussions on that, and in some of

the schools like University of Illinois, Chicago he tried to introduce that.

Other schools he was more focused at just specifically that school and that

campus. So it was an opportunity where Bruce was basically doing

commercial buildings, generally speaking.

Blum: Was SOM at this time giving credit to the designers of the projects? At one

time they just wanted SOM to be known as the creator of these buildings and

not the work of a specific designer. Was that an issue at the time you were

there?

Korista: I think when I was at SOM that there was still some of that discussion going

on, but I think it was breaking into where projects, drawings had people's

names on them. However, the partners were the ones that basically instigated

the projects, and the clients knew that they would be working with Bruce

Graham and Bill Hartmann. So whether their name was on it or not––

sometimes they wanted it on the drawings––there was definitely no

misunderstanding who was in charge of that. And usually by that time, when

there was a discussion or things showed up in newspapers, then it was Bruce

Graham or whoever the designer was. I think historically there's a lot of

projects in SOM's archives that even up through that time were identified

only by the chief architecture partner. And if you tried to find out who the

project partner was, if you tried to find out who the other architects working

on the project were, probably you can't. And certainly if you tried to find out

who the engineers were, it was even more difficult, other than when Bruce

and Faz Khan started working together. That certainly brought Faz's name to

the forefront on tall buildings such as Hancock and then Sears, and Hal

Iyengar was similar. They worked together a lot with Bruce, but still it was

probably more in the engineering world than it was in the total world,

although Faz Khan, certainly was there probably at the right time and the

right place for both he and Bruce. I think their names came to be a little bit

synonymous if you were going to build a really tall building somewhere in

the world, that you'd probably like to get those two people working together.

One's an engineer and one's an architect, and that certainly helped, within

SOM at least, it helped the integration of architectural and structural

engineering.

Blum: Was there competition? Or was there cooperation between some of these

groups?

Korista: Well, I think there was always competition, but as far as SOM goes, I think

SOM was trying to––and I still believe that's their goal––to provide the very

best design that has the very best functionality to it and execute that all the

way through construction with as great a degree of excellence as you can

possibly do. So I think that was and still is the goal. How you get there

always has pushes and pulls. However, as I say in the structural engineering

area, many times I would find myself working for all four of the main design

partners at the same time.

Blum: Tell us about that.

Korista: I should say three, Bruce and Myron Goldsmith and Walter Netsch. Because

both Walter and Myron kind of had to retire for health reasons a little bit

earlier than they probably would have, it kind of melded into a new group

which was, in Chicago probably Adrian Smith. He started coming up the line

and a little bit later Joe Gonzalez. But one of the things that was really

enjoyable was to be able to work with these different people. There are many,

many structural engineers in the world. They do a good job for one very

respected architect, and then they continue building on that business, which

from a business sense is good. But you continue just working for and get into

one train of thought for that architect, where here I had the opportunity over

the years to work for a whole bank of very, very good architects. Each one of

them had their own style and their own ideas of how it should be carried out.

Blum: What were some of the differences, say, working for Adrian or Bruce?

Korista: Well, Adrian or Bruce… Adrian was, I guess, considered to be one of the

disciples of Bruce Graham. He certainly has done a lot of commercial work

versus educational or special structures. I think Adrian had a much more,

and still does to some extent, classical approach. He was very much

interested in classical architectural design. His façades tend to bring back

things that haven't been tried and execute it very well with newer materials.

Bruce, to me, was interested in architectural design. He was always

interested in dealing with commercial buildings. Commercial buildings at the

period of time––the sixties and seventies and early eighties in this country

were being driven––the good ones, the big ones, the tall ones, were being

driven a lot by developers. Developers necessarily didn't all want… they

were kind of out of the corporate headquarters, which SOM did a lot of work

for in the forties and fifties. Gordon Bunshaft did many, many on the East

Coast, but those tend to be low-rise buildings. Bruce had very definite

thoughts on what kind of design, but his thing was more of a global picture

of the design. So he was interested––Well, okay, you want a tall building? It'll

be a tall building. Elevators? Yeah, we'll get somebody to get the elevators

right and the façade is… I want this and I'll work with you to come up with

how the façade works. Very much more of global integration versus Adrian,

who was interested in the whole project, but he was very interested that his

architectural representation, whether it be to the exterior or to the lobbies and

to the interiors, he was much more interested in the detail. Walter Netsch,

once he got into the educational area, was interested in the whole field of

education and how students respond to the environment that we build for

them. Myron was certainly one of Mies's disciples, and he was very much

interested in bringing simplicity and detail to everything he would see. So

those are distinct differences between people that go down the lines, and of

course time goes by…

Blum: Did you find that you could adapt to each one's methods of working, their

personality?

Korista: I think in any working relationship, certainly you adapt some and they

probably adapt to you, whether anybody wants to admit that or not. But I

believe it's still important to take good ideas, whoever generates them––and

usually it's a combination of thoughts––and work those into something that

is physically possible and then carry it out as far as construction goes. So that

you can take a good thought and bring it to a physical entity and do it well.

That's what I've always been interested in doing, versus just having a good

thought and letting it kind of wander and never come to a physical reality,

which unfortunately, I think, is becoming all too common these days. People

are interested in having their thoughts be computer generated, with no great

interest as to whether they become reality or not.

Blum: When you worked in teams, there had been some architectural critics that

accused, maybe that's too strong a word, but said that the team system, the

studio system, leads to sameness. It was SOM's desire to have a corporate-

type building that could be placed anywhere. Do you have any thoughts

about that?

Korista: I wouldn't agree that that was the goal or reality, and I don't think it probably

had too much to do with the system that was being used. Whether there's a

corporate image or not an image, certainly over any group of years,

somebody can probably identify that architect, and it's probably true of all

architects that have been successful. And I think SOM was a collective

because they had multiple design architects, partners, who had their own

styles. And for a period of time somebody could say, Well, that's a Bruce

Graham; that's an SOM building. I think very little of that came from where

there was a studio or a non-studio type of environment. I think the important

part was to get the architects and the engineers, especially structural

engineers, conceiving things to begin with, because you came up with not

only good architectural ideas, you came up with good engineering ideas at

the same time. And many times architecture comes up with a good

architectural thought and then it's handed to an engineer and told, "Well,

make it work." And to me there was a vast difference between working

together and "Make it work." I think many buildings turned out not as well

as they could have if the engineer was not just told, "Well, all right. Here it is,

just make it work." And I think that was true of all of the SOM architects and

designers that I worked with, all, maybe to differing degrees, really believed

that if you got the engineers involved, your end product that you could take

credit for 100 percent if you wanted to, was easier, or you could get more, or

you could push the envelope, or you could get somebody to spend some

more money or get better quality for less money if all of you were working

from day one together.

Blum: Was that the case usually, that the engineer was called in early?

Korista: I think it was, but I think if you went back into the forties and fifties, it was

more of architecture and then the engineers were supposed to make it work.

And I think certainly Faz Khan had a lot to do with that, mainly from those

post-war years that we finally got back to America wanting to rise up again

and have high-rise buildings. I think he fit in with Bruce in showing that at

least for high-rise buildings, it was good to get the two together, because

obviously they were together. The structure and the architecture had to be

together and then that floated down into the building. But a lot of Walter's

buildings, even with his Field Theory, and I don't know that Walter paid a

whole lot of attention to structural engineering, but you could tell that there

was an organization to this random Field Theory within the structure.

Whether everybody agreed with that or not is something else. But there is a

logic there of people working together, whether it was the smallest detail or a

global picture. And obviously architecture goes through a lot of evolutions of

thoughts. And sure, structural engineering is still structural engineering. You

get new materials and more and more computer horsepower to do things,

but you're still responding to this ever widening variety of architectural

ideas.

[Tape 1: Side B]

Blum: You joined SOM in 1965 and you were made a partner in 1986. How does a

young architect or engineer move up in the system of SOM? How did you?

Korista: Well, almost everyone is individual I think. All of us, in whatever we're

doing, there are obviously physical mileposts or guidelines, and they might

be that you're feeling that you have more responsibility; you're more in

charge of projects, you get to do your own thing more, you get to work on

more complex projects. Obviously, salary is there, and within SOM they have

grades of staff: associate, associate partner, and then partner. There are

intermediate levels, and I became an associate in 1971 and associate partner

in 1974. Now, and then partner was not until 1986, so I was on track and then

fell off the track a little bit. SOM is an architectural engineering firm, but

certainly the advancement and the opportunities of partnership is greater for

architects. Most of the project partners, which are the partners in charge of,

let's say, the business––not true business, but architectural engineering

business––come from the architectural ranks, so there's kind of a dual fork

there of architects that become design partners and architects that become

project partners. And structural engineers are structural engineers.

Blum: Well, as you advanced did you have to assume any administrative

responsibility?

Korista: Oh sure. Over the years you get more or less, depending upon what you

want to do, or what you're interested in doing, or your capabilities. So I guess

over the years I would say, some people would have called me more of a

generalist, but my interest was always structural engineering. I got involved,

not only in a structural engineering group, advancement, mentoring, but also

probably in the total office. Like for a while I got heavily involved in trying to

provide greater leadership or mentoring in the technology part of

architecture and how it blends with structural engineering. So it was

interesting, enjoyable, and I thought it was just natural. It wasn't that

somebody said, "Well, you have to do this." It was just a natural extension of

what I was always doing. Sometimes you become much more heavily

involved in working directly with clients. Sometimes there's a project team

that's out there in front of you and you don't get involved with the clients

that much. Generally my experience was to be on the front line right away.

Blum: With the client?

Korista: Yes, with the client, and if there's a problem with structural engineering, it

was your problem; it wasn't Bruce Graham's problem, which is all fair

enough. Then we were going into kind of an international status, so again,

there was traveling overseas as well as traveling around the U.S. I was

involved in quite a few projects here in Chicago, and also I was involved in a

lot of projects in a lot of other places, and that part was enjoyable and it keeps

expanding your view and your philosophy. Because when you're in other

cities and other countries, you do at least get to see changes of scene, unless

you close your eyes, to what other people are doing, what their likes are,

what the cultural differences are, what the construction differences are, what

their engineering and architecture are about and so all those things to me was

a very fast way of expanding your horizons.

Blum: Did you have as a goal to become a partner when you first joined SOM?

Korista: That was certainly… once I understood that that was the path to go there,

well, sure. Did I understand it was going to be difficult on the engineering

side? When I joined SOM in 1965 there had never been any engineer that was

a partner in the firm. John Merrill, Sr. had some engineering background and

he was one of the original three partners, but within SOM's confines he was

primarily, I'll say, more like Bill Hartmann. He was a business- and client-

related partner, not necessarily a designer.

Blum: Oh, I thought Nat Owings was the client contact partner.

Korista: Well, they all were, because they were starting the firm so they all had to find

business more than anything else. So Nat, spun off in planning and was

really kind of the linchpin of getting SOM involved into large projects and

most of them led to architecture.

Blum: Did you know Nat Owings?

Korista: I only met him. He was still around and would come back every now and

then and talk.

Blum: Did you ever know Louis Skidmore?

Korista: No. No, Skidmore and Merrill, I believe, were both past before I joined. But

Nat Owings, he was quite a character. I can remember him coming in to SOM

and he was well into his eighties and just expound on whatever he was

expounding upon. It was architecture and engineering and kind of the real

planning of things. But he was, certainly to me, the one that was in SOM who

really pushed the urban planning, even though he wasn't necessarily a

planner. He was the one that got SOM involved in things like the

Washington D.C. plan, work that we are still nominally involved with from a

master plan standpoint. It kind of went from Owings to David Childs, and

that was over a forty-year period. We're still kind of nominally involved with

the mall. But he also was the one that got involved with, post-World War II,

things like Oak Ridge. That started out with planning, and then we wound

up doing a lot of buildings down there when they were doing the first

nuclear stuff down there. Those were before I got there, but that's my

perception of him––that big things are good, which I believe in.

Blum: Well, shall we start with some of your early projects?

Korista: Certainly.

Blum: One of the early projects was the McMath Solar Telescope designed by

Myron.

Korista: Myron, yeah.

Blum: How did you come to that project?

Korista: The solar telescope, which is at Kitt Peak in Arizona, was the first of a series

of telescopes that are still being added to Kitt Peak, which happens to be one

of the taller mountains, not super tall, that lie in north central Arizona. The

solar telescope was already designed and construction had started. However,

there was another telescope which was a reflecting telescope, it's one up on

top of the peak, and the whole top turns and you have a telescope like we all

think about telescopes.

Blum: Do you mean the reflecting telescope?

Korista: Yes, but on a big scale. It was being built, and as that was being built I was

involved with the design in Chicago and I got a chance to go out there. When

they were starting to build that they were basically finishing the construction

of the solar telescope. So as SOM would normally go, okay, you're a nice,

young structural engineer, why don't you pay attention to know if they are

happy with this? And the solar telescope was something that actually went

down into the earth because they wanted to not let anything affect it other

than it's unidirectional looking at the sun. In other words, temperature

variations and so forth, can affect what you're observing. This is basically a

tube that extends in what we would think of as a tunnel down in the ground,

and it basically is used only for looking directly at the sun and measuring

and monitoring all of those type of things. So in design and construction, I

was actually more involved with the reflecting telescope which is just 400 feet

away from the solar telescope. I had a chance to work on that. Myron was

involved in all of that. And we had a third telescope that came off of that

which was down in Cerro Tololo in Chile. Those three telescopes were kind

of bing, bing, bing in time, and they were relatively short periods of time, so I

had a chance to work with Myron on all three of those. And he was very

interesting. He was always, because he had engineering training, he was very

much interested in technical and technology, let alone the Miesian simplicity

of showing what you're building. Obviously these reflecting telescopes that

turn around, the whole top turns, they have certain functional requirements.

But we got some nice architectural elements built into the legs, and of course

they are very predominant because they're sitting on top of a mountain, so

they're never shielded. So to me there was a very, very interesting technology

type of thing. I would have never thought I was going to be working on a

telescope when I started working at SOM. But I had a chance to work on that.

Another project that was working with Myron… he was probably the first

partner I had the most contact with.

Blum: Wasn't Bill Dunlap also on that job?

Korista: Yes, he was like the project-manager, as we called it. There's project partners

that deal more with the business side of it and keeping the client happy side

of it, and then the design partner. In that case Myron was not yet a partner,

but he was considered to be a designer. There wasn't another partner on top

of that. That's really doing the architectural reality of design, however far

they want to carry that. So most all projects have one of each of those. At that

time there were no engineering partners; actually our engineering team was

just the structural engineers. There was no senior structural engineer there

was just project structural engineers.

Blum: Well, I have heard other people say that Myron was a wonderful designer,

but he took his time and he would change his mind frequently. Did you have

that experience too?

Korista: I think he wouldn't change his mind; he'd change his mind as far as detail

goes. I think usually he knew what he wanted from the beginning but how

you accomplish that along the way… many times the speed of the thought

process was not equal to the reality of the project process. So I don't think he

changed his mind from, Well, we're going to do one that looks like this to

something that looks like that. It was just that he had the concept. It was

always in his first sketches. They would be about what you finally got to. It

was just how you wound up getting there.

Blum: That particular project, the McMath Solar Telescope, has been called

sculptural engineering. What do you think they mean by that?

Korista: It's sculptural engineering because if you don't know it's a solar telescope,

when you go down there, first of all, your impression would be, what is this

monument? The reflecting telescopes, they're up on legs, they're up in the

sky, they have a slot in the top—right? That's a telescope. The solar telescope,

when you approach it, all you see is, basically, concrete coming up but you

don't know it's coming out of the ground. It looks like it's sitting on top of the

ground and it becomes a sculpture. So functionally, there has to be a very

rigid geometry that this chamber which the solar rays came though and were

reflected down to the end that was in the ground––so when you look at it, it

is shaped like a sculpture. Part of that was functional; it had to be that way to

be able to take this tube. The tube is–– I forget what it is, twelve feet in

diameter in the inside or something like that––and it's filled with reflectors

and refractors that take the sunlight and bring it down. So at the top it does

look like, you would say it was a piece of sculpture before somebody would

say, "No, that's a telescope that goes down into the ground."

Blum: But that's very interesting that you say that it was as much, if not more, a

technical decision, an engineering decision as opposed to an aesthetic one.

Korista: And I would say that many, many of Myron's things are that way. He, as I

say, he did have an engineering background and I think he thought a little bit

like that as many of his things among today's architecture people would have

called, well, that's technical architecture. I didn't work on all of his projects,

but he did a couple of airline hangers, and people would look at it and say,

Well, that's technical architecture. You could read the function, and it didn't

go beyond the swoop––I don't think I can come up with the right names––but

Dulles Airport and some of those which were later had a lot of…

Blum: Are you thinking of the work of Eero Saarinen?

Korista: Saarinen, had a lot of swoops and things, where Myron when he was doing

something, he usually was… somebody would say it's technical architecture.

Even his buildings, somebody would say, Well, it's technical architecture; it's

Miesian architecture. But what was Mies? Mies was doing simplicity and let

the thing show. If you build it out of three pieces of wood, well, then let the

wood show, just figure out how you do it. Though he didn't like wood, he

liked steel, so it wasn't a good example, but…

Blum: Would that be considered industrial architecture?

Korista: Oh some people would call it that, but it was much higher grade than that, it

would be high-grade industrial architecture, because industrial architecture

is pure function. This is driven beyond function. But specifically the solar

telescope certainly had a lot of functional requirements to meet. As you

approach it, you can kind of see it as something that looks like pure

sculpture, and if you follow it you'll find that it's not just a round tube that

goes down in the ground, it's actually a multi-faceted concrete thing that goes

down into the ground.

Blum: Were there things that you learned, working on this project that stood you in

good stead in other projects? Were you able to carry over this knowledge?

Korista: I think I had a good idea of… number one, that was probably most

interesting which encourages your thought and experience process to learn

that SOM was a firm that didn't do just buildings; they did these completely

different scientific projects too. You can't call them buildings, they're just

scientific projects, and that they were interested in doing that. It wasn't just

like, Oh well, we did it because somebody really asked us. They were really

interested in doing it. I think specifically with Myron it was a good chance to

kind of learn how his thought processes were and what he was most

interested in and less interested in, so it was a learning process.

Blum: Myron was interested in exploring different ideas researchwise, and he

taught students at IIT, I think along with Fazlur Khan. Did you do any of

that?

Korista: I wasn't directly involved with them at IIT, but certainly Fazlur and Myron

had worked together quite closely with many of the ideas for taller buildings

coming out of their workshops. They used to work with architectural

students who were doing their master's degree theses. Not to how you really

do it, but at least conceptually of what it would be. I think I always wondered

with Myron, other than the Brunswick building that is very structuralistic,

why Myron didn't really pursue more tall buildings. On the one hand he and

Fazlur were doing it over the weekends and at night––all these different

schemes for how to––because Fazlur's intent was we should be able to create

tall, graceful, integrated architecture and engineering. With that Myron was

there with him. And yet most of his work at SOM, in my time, was more

specific, atypical, non-straightforward tall building kind of things. It was a

variety of things, which I think he liked because it gave him freedom. Maybe

it was because of not being driven by a developer who says, "Now you have

to do this, this, this, this, this, this, and that fast and still do what you

consider to be good architecture." It was just something he didn't particularly

want to pursue. That was always a quandary in my mind. I never did

challenge him on the thing of, well, we have a lot of these great ideas. Why

don't we do more of these things?

Blum: Well, the Brunswick building did have a distinct feature.

Korista: Oh, yeah. The Brunswick building is his primary tall building, and it's thirty-

seven or thirty-eight stories tall. But again, it was working exactly with Faz

and it came out of IIT; the exterior tubular system which was very linear,

which was in concrete and Miesian to a certain degree. It had this very large

transfer girder at the bottom of it which was technologically challenging and

interesting. I can remember Myron had a lot of discussions on that because

again, that was just in the construction phase when I first joined SOM.

Blum: Did Myron do a lot of his own engineering? Say, for instance, on the

Brunswick?

Korista: No, he certainly was knowledgeable when we talked about structural

engineering, like if we were okay or not. Certainly on some of the longer

span things he did, he would always interject, "Oh, well, it can be smaller

than that." So he did actually know enough about engineering to say, Well,

why can't it be smaller? Why can't it be round instead of square? Why can't it

be this?

Blum: Going back for a minute to the telescope, the Kitt Peak project. Was wind an

issue there?

Korista: Yeah, wind and seismic were both issues.

Blum: It's hard to tell scale of that structure from photographs.

Korista: The seismic was probably for the solar telescope going down into the ground;

it had very little structural wind effect. They were concerned about any

telescope regarding thermal movements, which is just the air temperature

changes from cold to warm. That's one of the reasons they put it

underground, so that they could stabilize the temperature and the humidity

and the wind effects and all those things as much as possible. Where most

telescopes are up in the air where they're open at night, the structure that's

holding them up there moves, expands and contracts. The wind blows and it

moves it back and forth, in very small amounts, but when you're talking

about a telescope, very small amounts are what we would consider miniscule

movements, so one of the reasons that the solar telescope is down in the

ground is to try to minimize temperature differentials just on the housing

itself. So there is some seismic behavior down there, not a great degree. So

wind has very little effect on the solar telescope.

Blum: Walter also had an opportunity to do a telescope at Northwestern, the

Lindheimer. Did you work on that?

Korista: Yeah, I worked on part of that, and then I took it apart ten years ago or

something like that.

Blum: I understand it was quite difficult to take apart. I mean, they needed to try

repeatedly before it came down.

Korista: Well, some people, when we took it apart, wanted to take it apart and put it

back together somewhere, which other telescopes have done. Other people

just wanted to chop it up, and we were somewhere in between. That one was

to me, that process wasn't a Myron process. It was Walter understanding that

they wanted a telescope, and wanted it to be out on a promontory. He was

involved in the master plan at that time with all the other buildings that for

that period of time he was doing at Northwestern. Okay, just do it, and then

Northwestern wanted us to do it like overnight! So there were a lot of details.

I would say, in no disrespect to Walter, but it was not a significantly

technically detailed housing system. It was, "Hurry up, do it fast, and make it

look okay." I think it looked okay except when you got up close. So that's

what people complained about when they were taking it apart. You know,

there were heavy pipes and heavy welds and oh…

Blum: Why was it so difficult to dismantle?

Korista: That's because it just used heavier materials because it was quicker to do. It

was a super fast project that they wanted to get done. And unlike Myron,

who would get involved in all the details of why it is this and why couldn't

we do this a little bit––there wasn't that luxury of time. Walter had accepted

more of the idea that we have to have it and it should look about these

proportions and the scientists at Northwestern wanted to have about that

proportion. So there was a difference between them. Myron would have

taken it apart much more and said we need more time.

Blum: Would he have ever met the deadline though?

Korista: That's right. Probably that's the biggest case.

Blum: The late-sixties and early seventies were times of great unrest. There were

many social issues that were working their way to the surface. How did that

manifest itself at SOM?

Korista: Very honestly maybe it's because I'm looking at it from the engineering side

of it. Within SOM I don't recall great debates about other things, other than

those are things that are occurring out there and our work continues on in

here. I can't really say that there was a lot of change to the architecture

because of these external debates. We were still doing things all around the

country; we were doing tall buildings and small buildings and schools and

hospitals. We were doing a lot of different things. So to say that it had a

major impact––I don't really see that it did.

Blum: What about the makeup of the staff at SOM? Were there women on staff?

Were there African Americans on staff?

Korista: SOM Chicago––now each one of SOM's offices have different characteristics,

but SOM Chicago from the time I started there always had women architects

and engineers in all phases of architecture, interiors, planning.

Blum: At this time how many women were in…

Korista: Oh I don't know. There was probably never enough if you're looking at it…

Blum: To satisfy women?

Korista: To satisfy it, yes, but it was probably also there weren't that many people

involved. Certainly we tend to find today, I think in structural engineering

many, many more women who are involved in structural engineering

training, or mechanical engineering training, coming out of school. It used to

be architecture was about the only place you'd see very many women at all in

any of the disciplines that focus on buildings. We always had a wide

dichotomy of people from around the world at the Chicago office. Now if

you went to New York you'd get a different answer, because very honestly

the different offices were made up differently. There was no consistency of

people. But Chicago, I think had diversity because we in the Chicago office

weren't geographically bound; Chicago always did more stuff all over the

United States. New York was more East Coast bound, and New York and San

Francisco still are more geographical bound, while here Chicago was sitting

there and going overseas, and going to Texas, and going to New York, and

going to Boston. If you asked the people in the New York or San Francisco

office what their career path was and where, they had certain projects, you'd

find out it'd be very different from when you're talking to somebody from

Chicago that kind of just went all over. And because we went all over, I think

that's why we attracted people from all over. So having a very diverse

population of engineers and architects at SOM, to me, is just normal.

Blum: Walter has said that he felt strongly around these years that there should be

some sensitivity training in the office. He said that he either conducted

sensitivity training or instituted it for his group.

Korista: Well, certainly those were years where there was not things like HR groups,

and in fact, HR groups didn't happen until the nineties.

Blum: HR, human relations?

Korista: Human resources or relationships, okay. So everybody there let's say,

somewhat fended for themselves. So did different partners and their groups.

If people were upset, or couldn't work, or have to work more, or work only

on weekends, or work only at night, or somebody yelling at somebody, and

whether these did affect their design, or did it give them increased

motivation? This was all handled locally. All tension creates some increase in

motivation and good thoughts, but too much tension then destroys that and

goes the other way. In a mix of people and cultural ways people's thinking

and ways of wanting to work and react, differ. Obviously when you're a firm

you're trying to turn out projects. From a business standpoint you're just like,

well, everybody do their job and keep going. Actually you have this mix of a

lot of people doing different projects, because you didn't have a chance to be

on only one project. So there were a lot of reasons, I suppose, if you said

sensitivity: trying to get the best out of people, trying to get them to think

outside of the box, trying to just respond personably together and/or to

clients and/or to their partners, that was all important. During that period of

time there wasn't a whole lot of that, although I know a number of times in

individual instances there were always people that could be pointed at, but

in general I never felt that there was significant problems as far as how

people worked.

Blum: Were African Americans on staff? Architects and engineers?

Korista: Yeah. Again, has there ever been as many as there could be? No. But there's

never been a thing of not… Because we've always hired our own, each

discipline kind of hired their people. And since Faz Khan never wanted to get

into thinking too much about hiring, so I got very involved very early, like

after I was there for maybe three years, in trying to keep the structural group

up, and that means you interview lots of people. Today there's still not as

many African Americans as could be, but on the other hand, at schools, for

whatever reason, there are very few people that are going into architecture

and engineering now.

Blum: Oh, isn't that interesting.

Korista: Yeah, I mean you go around and interview at schools, you find very few.

We've always hired generally at the graduate, master's level.

Blum: What's happened to the profession that is not attracting young people?

Korista: Well, you just find people. From what I know I think we go through periods

of time where people think that engineering or architecture are not the thing

to do, and computer science is where we are now. Maybe it's not even

computer science, it's IT, information technology, that's the place to be, or

business is the place to be, or you should mix engineering and business

degrees. You have architecture––there isn't too many mixes–– architecture

and engineering is one side mix, but it's people's perception of what they

want to do. I wish there were more people who went into architecture and

engineering.

Blum: Well, at the end of the seventies, into the eighties, there was a recession and

that surely must have affected architecture. And at that time, modernism, as

practiced by Mies, was losing favor. It had sort of run its course, and even the

skyscraper had fallen into disfavor.

Korista: Um-hmm. I think that the later-sixties, the seventies, and early eighties were,

especially for commercial jobs or corporate headquarters, we became

involved with developers and speculative developers, which not all of them

were interested in the best architecture or the best engineering. They were

only interested in building something that would be at the least cost that

would give a functional shape to it. So I think architecture and engineering

thinking outside the box was stifled a little bit by the developers.

Blum: At that time even Nat Owings said that SOM is no longer a cutting-edge,

innovative firm, but he said that SOM is now an order taker.

Korista: I believe because a lot of the available work became commercial related work,

and there wasn't a lot of residential going on. We drifted away from

educational work, especially in the early eighties, primarily because Walter

was the one that always had the interest of the partners in educational work.

So we were caught up in these commercial projects, and the commercial

projects were heavily driven by developers, many of which were doing

speculative development. This means they didn't even have anybody sorted

out when they wanted to do the building. On the one hand, certainly, they

were a driving force, like Jerry Hines was a driving force of doing taller

buildings. For a while, special buildings were certainly of great interest to

structural engineers. So you can't say it was all the wrong way, but the

developers became very difficult to please. If you wanted to use stainless

steel, no way! You want to use this kind of stone, well maybe, you want to

use that kind of glass…

Blum: This was the developer's attitude?

Korista: It was developers because they were looking for… "Yeah, okay, make it look

good, but it's got to be for the least cost possible, because I don't know if I

even have a tenant for this." So we got out of the corporate headquarters,

became less the corporate headquarters architect. The corporation wants to

make itself known, so it's willing to spend more money so you can do better

architecture. So through the seventies and early eighties we were that. Now

there was an economic hiccup in the late seventies that affected everyone,

including SOM. We had a very, very large staff, because we were doing the

big King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, so there

was a very large staff for that. But when that was done, which unfortunately

was right about then, there was certainly an economic hiccup, but overall the

work continued on.

Blum: What happened to the design if modernism had fallen out of favor, what

came to replace it?

Korista: I think for a period of time, classical design kind of came back in favor. I

think that's one of the reasons people like Adrian Smith at least reflected it,

not classical, classical, classical, but at least in the façades that seemed to be

something that said it's high quality. It did some of that, but what the driving

forces are, I'll say I never studied that closely. It depends on who was driving

the ship. As the developers drove the ship less, and we weren't into a

recession, that's why I think in the nineties we started to see more work

overseas: big projects overseas, major projects maybe driven by some

international group. But in London SOM in the late eighties and the early

nineties there was a lot of London work. Right now there's been a lot of

Middle Eastern work and a lot of China work. People are looking still for

icons for their city or for themselves or whatever. And they're willing to pay

a higher price, which does allow more investiture in architecture. A kind of

sway away from when nobody would pay the higher price for enhanced

architecture. So I think the eighties were a time of transitioning. Developers,

spec developers, couldn't make it anymore because they couldn't just go out

and spend. Prices kept going up, and to spend $100, $150 million when they

don't even know number one person who's going to rent their building. So a

little bit of that started to move away, and then I think we became more

involved internationally––all the U.S. architects––which then, again, changed

the ship. But I'll say I can't comment on what's driving the changes. Our

structural group, not me personally, did a little work with Frank Gehry.

Frank is a very bright architect; he had his own thoughts. How he got there

I'll say I'm not all together sure, but his work has held up for ten or fifteen

years, and I would guess that it would continue on or not…

Blum: Are you talking about Millennium Park?

Korista: Oh, I'm talking about Frank Gehry's bandshell part of it and his work in

general. I mean probably the first thing of recognition we were involved with

him was in Bilbao with the Guggenheim Art Museum. That was kind of his

first well-recognized, whatever type of architecture you would call that to be,

because before that he was basically known as somebody who does special

sculptures that are different. But what drives that? I don't know what drives

that. It became something that people thought is something different. That

gives me an icon. That gives me… and I have enough money to pay for it. If

you look at the architecture today, I don't even know what to call it today. It's

not structuralist––I have no idea what we call our architects today––modern

architecture, next phase. I mean the buildings that twist and turn and lean

over to one way or lean over to the other way. In the past people would say,

don't lean the building over. People won't feel good going up into it! Well,

nowadays buildings are all leaning somewhere or twisting somewhere, and

will they all be built or not? I question it, because you simply go beyond

where… If you're going to do a good quality building, especially a taller

building, it's got to be simple. So you've got to have a simple architectural

thought and a simple structural thought and put them together. That doesn't

mean Miesian is simple. It could be more complicated, but it still would have

to be able to be buildable and not just, as I mentioned before abstractly,

where you're randomly putting your thoughts on a piece of paper and

saying, well, how about one of these?

Blum: Back to this period of transition, do you remember that there was a Chicago

Seven group?

Korista: Sure.

Blum: Younger architects who recognized the dichotomy in architecture with the

Miesians in one camp and the post-modern people in another.

Korista: I think it was just, again, I think it was that generation saying, Well look, we

want to do our own things. We don't want to wait forty years to say that we

can do our own thing. So it's kind of the breaking away from… that younger

architects can make an impact and you don't always have to wait until you've

done architecture for twenty or thirty years. To me, as a structural engineer, it

has been… not that some beautiful things haven't been turned out, but it's

been somewhat, call it what you may, it's been somewhat of a confused time

for probably twenty-five years of never really saying… structuralist is kind of

definable. What's deconstructive? That's nice somebody coined the word, you

know somebody is…

Blum: Do you think that's too academic and not in tune with reality?

Korista: I guess if you're trying to name things, yes. I think things should still be

based upon quality, and good architecture means quality and excellence of

being able to build it.

Blum: In 1972 you were involved with another of Myron's projects, the Republic

newspaper printing plant in Columbus, Indiana.

Korista: Yeah, Columbus, Indiana. I was certainly I'll say, I guess I was naïve until I

got on that project. But it's a wondrous place, because there were many,

many name architects that were allowed to, or invited to do various

buildings in Columbus but not tall buildings.

Blum: Can you describe how that all took shape in Columbus?

Korista: In Columbus, I think it was the home or headquarters of the Cummins

Engine Company, which was, for a while or maybe still is, one of the largest

in the world as far as making all kinds of diesel engines. And the ownership

of that group felt very strongly about architecture for personal reasons, and

spent a lot of money. Not only with their tax money that they got from being

in Columbus, but they also donated lots and lots of money to encourage the

city to go out and attract talented architects. Because most of the work there

that was done initially was school buildings, post offices, city hall as I recall;

they were all done basically with Cummins support. Not only from the sales

tax aspect but just donating monies to at least get the architects' fees paid for,

if not beyond that. So it was a very interesting place. The Republic was great

because here I got a chance to learn about printing plants. But again, it was

working with Myron and just forcing the issue of being very minimalist as far

as the structure, and let the structure and the function of the building be

exposed, just like Crown Hall at IIT. There's a lot of big windows and very,

very small structure. You can go look in and see the printing plant printing.

You can see through the glass where the paper rolls go in and you can see

where the papers come out. And you can see where the editorial staff is

working. So it was a very––maybe to the people inside it was like living in a

fish bowl––but it was very, very functional as a linear building. Basically any

type of printing press tends to be a linear operation, all the way from people

who are writing up editorials, to how you get into print set, and so on down

the line. It was great just being able to visit other projects down there.

Blum: Why was the printing plant so transparent?

Korista: I think it's Irwin Miller, the owner of the Republic press. He was very, very

interested architecturally; I think because he was influenced being in the

town. But he was very interested and enthused with Myron doing simple

things. It's a one-story building, showing what's going on in this paper plant,

rather than covering it all up with brick and saying, I make newspapers in

there. All the different machines and processes were painted different colors

so you could actually see this whole calliope of colors as you walked through

the thing. You could say, Well, that's where the print set––at that time it was

not computerized––the print set was there, and the rolls come here and the

paper goes here. You could see them put the papers in the trucks; he was

interested in that and showing the world what he was doing.

Blum: This was another project that has been called sculptural engineering.

Korista: Yeah, I think it's sculptural engineering because basically it's following

function. It's minimalist, and you can see how the structure's responding to

the process. Paper printing is not a very sophisticated process, but it's an

interesting process, so why not just show it all happening? So you don't have

to have very much structure; you have lots of glass. I think it makes the

environment inside for the workers much nicer because they get to see

things.

Blum: With all the glass, yes.

Korista: The glass––it's like a glass box, which is basically Miesian––makes the

structure simple, makes it functional. Mies always liked to use glass

wherever he could. So I think part of the IIT experience that Myron went

through, in doing some of the buildings he did there at IIT was transposed

down there to Columbus, where they basically used glass. Now this was all

clear glass, where at IIT some of it is opaque type of glass. But you see all the

structure; he was happy. You see all the processes; the client was happy.

Blum: What was the experience like for you?

Korista: It was great, because it was doing a building, in this case with Myron, and it

was fun. It wasn't such a massive scale project. It was easy to understand, it

was easy to work with the owner and with the contractor. Almost the whole

exercise was structural, which I thought was great. Just learning how the

printing press is put together and fits down into a pit in the ground and

you've got to get the rolls in it. So it was a learning experience too, which

helped, because after that, over the years, I was probably involved in two or

three other printing plants, none of which were, I think, as nice as that. And

when it was all done, it was just this nice crystal box that clearly told you

everything that was going on in the building.

Blum: Well, apparently the AIA [American Institute of Architects] liked it too,

because it was awarded an honor award.

Korista: Right, which was I think well-deserved for Myron.

[Tape 2: Side A]

Blum: Before we move on, you said you have something you want to add to what

we've already recorded about Myron––would you…

Korista: Well, you had asked a question toward the end of our session yesterday of

what did I learn. And I think that one of the things I had learned, because I

was relatively young in my career and working with Myron, is that you can

get very elegant architecture using very simple structure. Architecture

doesn't have to be huge and tall and wide; it can be small and very elegant.

And I think that's one of the things, certainly, I came away from on the

Republic newspaper job.

Blum: Well, that's a very good lesson. You also said yesterday that you appreciated

the fact that within your career, you were able to work with various

designers, and they each had their own style and the type of building they

preferred. We did look at a project or two of yours, with Myron as the

designer. You had worked on many, many facets of projects with Walter

Netsch. He was another designer you mentioned, and the project was the

[School of the] Art Institute of Chicago, the addition of the school, the

remodeling of the Sullivan Trading Room, and various other aspects of that

project.

Korista: Again, one of the things I think about my career and history that's important,

was the chance to work on a lot of different types of building projects with at

least four or five significant architects of the period. That to me was very

challenging and was probably the enriching and rewarding part of it, because

each one of them was different; they didn't all do high-rise buildings or low-

rise buildings or small buildings or big buildings. I did different things, and

that was to me probably the most enriching part of working with SOM then

and now.

Blum: What was the Art Institute job like?

Korista: I started working with Walter, but as I mentioned previously, I might be

working with Walter, I might also be working with Myron and working with

Bruce, all at the same time. One of the first jobs, right before the Art Institute

was the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, which was very

interesting. It made me realize the context of things Walter was trying to do.

Again, Walter was, in my mind, a very aggressive intellectual in the field of

architecture. He took a very intellectual approach, not necessarily a technical

approach, not necessarily a pure architectural form approach. To me it was

an intellectual approach; intellectual, not in the sense of smart or not smart,

but in the sense that he was looking beyond. I mean, in today's world,

probably, he might have become a systems person in computer technology

because he looked at the totality of things. His thing was not necessarily the

last detail, but it was how do you put the whole project together and how the

project fits the environment in what he was putting. Now most of my career

work with Walter was in the educational field, so it was at, primarily,

universities. So my context is what he did at universities, and to me he was

an architectural planner and an architect for universities. So we're talking

about a higher level of education. And really, I think his intellect from his

school days kind of fed through that. I think his personal love of art, not

necessarily just architecture but of art, influenced what he tried to do in

developing various theories that he came up with in architecture. His concept

was more than just a building. He was always looking at several buildings;

whether he did them or not was something else. He was certainly involved in

a lot of master planning or sub-master planning.

Blum: Well, I can think of, for instance, three libraries that Walter did within a short

space of time: the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the

Regenstein Library at Northwestern, and the University of Illinois library at

Chicago Circle. Did you work on all three of those projects with him?

Korista: No, actually I worked on Regenstein.

Blum: Which one?

Korista: The Regenstein at the University of Chicago. And I worked on the

construction phase of the library at the University of Illinois, Chicago

campus. I did not work on the one at Northwestern, though I did work with

him on two other buildings at Northwestern. One was the––oh gee, I think it

was one of the science buildings, biological science or something.

Blum: Behavioral?

Korista: Behavioral science, there's a behavioral science building at the University of

Illinois, Chicago, which I know I worked on. And I think at Northwestern

too, I think it was biological sciences or something like that. And then later on

we actually redid the boiler plant up there, which is not so much architecture,

but it was interesting engineering. The School of the Art Institute was one of

the projects I was involved with him on kind of from the beginning to the

end. It happened to be close by, so you got to see it and progress with it.

Again, to me he was interjecting various ideas within the space inside. He

was always trying to look inside as well as outside, so he tried to do things

that he perceived would be a different student environment or would help

whatever they were trying to do in a student environment. That developed

eventually into what people talked on and on about, and I won't say that I

totally understand it. To me it was kind of a systems approach, not in

systems as computer systems, but just a behavioral systems approach of

trying to refocus types of educational buildings and educational

environments.

Blum: Can you give an example of what he did, say, at the School of the Art

Institute in that way?

Korista: I think the School of the Art Institute was just kind of the beginning of that.

He already was doing some of the work at the University of Illinois campus.

To me he was not necessarily a technical architect like Myron. Again, he was

looking at space and volumes. I wouldn't say he was an exterior façade

architect, like maybe Adrian Smith, as comparisons go. To me Walter was

looking at the total project and especially the interior environment. So he

tended to move rather into traditional schools, which had columns all lined

up of the same dimension, and all the floors the same height, and all the

stairs over there in the corner. He began mixing those and putting stairs in

different places, and having open classrooms in some cases, and open studios

in some cases. And some of that was at the School of the Art Institute––

whether it still exists today, I don't know––I haven't been there for a long

time. But it was just a different environment, and he did it in a way that

didn't clash with the Art Institute itself. It didn't try to override it; it was

something that was going to be part of, but not entirely, the Art Institute of

Chicago.

Blum: And where did the engineering come in? Where did you come into this

project?

Korista: Well, again, you're developing a relationship with various architectural

designers and architectural teams that were of the same ilk. So rather than

fighting the thing and saying, "No, no, no, wait a minute now, you put

columns at twenty feet on center," just make all the columns at twenty feet on

center. Let's make all the columns square columns, and let's make all the

floors the same floor. Let's not have floors that hang out from the structure,

which are called cantilevers, because they're only supported back here.

Netsch used a lot of those type of things. Why not put more uniformity into

it? Well, I think the structural engineering and my response to it was, okay,

he was looking at a more freeform interior space type of architecture than the

normal building. It wasn't the normal school, or it wasn't the normal old type

especially on the inside. I mean the outside of a lot of older university

buildings were very, very ornate and very classical. To me he wasn't

interested in that. The outside could be new to show that it was something

new, and he spent a lot…

Blum: It was also to be used by much younger people, students, as opposed to the

museum audience.

Korista: But all his campuses like were that. He was showing that it was something

new; it was something modern, but not necessarily a modernistic using high-

tech. He used basically stone and concrete on the outside of his buildings,

precast concrete or just plain poured-in-place concrete. And so it showed that

it was new. He occasionally used limestone, but not always, because it was

common to, certainly, in the Chicago area and the Midwest area. That's when

he went to other schools. So he certainly dabbled in other systems, but it was

not from a technical approach as far as I was concerned. He let that just

evolve.

Blum: That was your job.

Korista: That was my job, to an extent. Part of it is cost-based, part of it is what we

were trying to create. Concrete in schools provides easier maintenance than

other forms of old wood structures or old and new steel structures. It gives a

lot of mass, so when you're talking about sound––in schools a lot of problems

are just acoustics between room to room and floor to floor. And at that time,

the rest of the commercial buildings and the new buildings that were going

forward, were using more and more steel, lighter and lighter construction,

less and less loads, faster to put together, and so forth. But schools don't

really fit that characteristic that much. I mean, as I say––mass for acoustics,

mass for just the maintenance of systems, concrete columns that could be

exposed. Steel columns usually you've got to fireproof them and then wrap

them in masonry, whereas concrete columns, if you want, can be exposed. So

concrete was a very powerful tool, and he used it very well. Now several

other projects we got offered and we did over time––I think I probably

worked at more than a dozen different university projects with him. At

Grinnell College, we used different materials. At Wells College we went into

laminated wood. Now I don't think he all of a sudden thought laminated

wood is what schools should be done with; it was a smaller library at Wells

College.

Blum: Why do you think he used it in that instance?

Korista: I think he was just looking for… The library was relatively small; it was just a

single story. It had a very natural setting on the campus. We had to take out a

few trees and the rest of it was all plantings, and so forth. So it was a natural

setting, and for some brief moment he said, "Why not!" And we actually did

build wood tree-type construction. If you look inside, instead of the columns

being vertical things, they're sloping pieces of wood. So it's all exposed wood

inside. That's just an example of what he was willing to try with different

materials, but that wasn't his main focus. He was looking at the environment;

he was looking at how the students would react. And that's the way I felt,

you know, looking at the project.

Blum: And what was the bottom line, say, to the wood building that he did?

Korista: The bottom line is I liked the way it turned out, as far as I can see.

Blum: Was it considered successful by the people who used it?

Korista: Sure, yeah. It was very beautiful, and I think everybody enjoyed it because it

was open. It was something different than other buildings you walk in and

there's a ceiling. But here there was no ceiling; it was all laminated wood.

Today most wood buildings are some type of resort or something, where you

see them use laminated wood. At this time, which was back in the early

seventies, it was different, he was using a newer material. Laminated wood

versus just solid pieces of wood that things used to be built out of. Laminated

is pieces of wood put together. It was interesting. We used it in a couple of

buildings at Grinnell College in Iowa. They did a gymnasium, and again, we

had very long spans of wood beams rather than––most auditoriums you go

in, and gymnasiums you go in, then and now––you see a bunch of steel

trusses that go along a long distance. And there's nothing wrong with that,

but in this case we actually used big wood beams, and it brought kind of a

different look. He might have felt like many people do that wood was more

informal, it's something that [will] bring you into it. If you can see it rather

than it's just behind that wall, or it's under three layers of carpeting, which

probably some of this building is. I think he did that but most of his work

was concrete, which was consistent with schools. I think as far as technology

goes, he didn't worry about it too much beyond that.

Blum: Do you think Walter used any of his Field Theory in designing these libraries

and buildings?

Korista: Yeah, I would say the Field Theory was. I can't define his Field Theory, but in

my perception it was Field Theory. It was really coming out. The University

of Illinois in Chicago was done in seven or eight phases, and I was probably

involved in maybe phase three, four, and five.

Blum: The early phases.

Korista: It seemed like he was just experimenting with what the environment or the

volumetric or what the shapes were. I don't know that he was as interested

about the outside shape as what the inside volumetric shapes were, that

classrooms were not always square, and that you could build auditoriums,

small lecture halls, but if you rotated things around… To me today, instead

of Field Theory, I think somebody would say––I don't know what you would

call it––a student environmental system, because to me it was creating spaces

for students. Now that's not all the intellectual side of the Field Theory, but

people have debated that for ever and ever and claimed that all of his

buildings were because of Field Theory. I don't believe that, because certainly

all the buildings he did, he didn't go to the same… We did an art museum at

the Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. And that had nothing to do with Field

Theory. That was just a nice art museum. It had its own shape to it, and in

some places we developed some long-span structural roof areas, and we used

some wood, and we used instead of just big, wood beams, we actually made

some cable and wood trusses that then were exposed in the library. But

again, I don't think it had anything to do with Field Theory; that was just an

interest. So I think, probably on his projects, it was in his school buildings

versus his libraries or some of the museums, although there weren't a lot of

museums that I worked on. But it was mainly educational. At MIT he had

started way back in the late fifties, and he was still going when I was there.

He did, I don't know, seven or eight buildings there.

Blum: Did he do their library?

Korista: I'll say I've forgotten. I wasn't involved. Most of the buildings he was doing

there were really functional classroom buildings, and I worked on maybe

two or three. And he was into his exposed concrete, inside and outside, kind

of minimalist architecture. He did about eight buildings out there between

1958 and 1972.

Blum: Well, at the Art Institute, he did the addition of the School of the Art Institute.

His siting of the Sullivan arch was something that caught the attention of

some critics. What kind of problems did that present? And did it involve

you?

Korista: To some extent it was engineering. I think a lot of it was probably his concept

of how it fit, his personal concept to how it should fit or could fit into the Art

Institute campus, or what he would call the campus. I think it's the same way

with the Sullivan [Trading] Room renovation. I sat in a lot of meetings where

people debated on and on, forever on what should be and what shouldn't be.

I think what was done as far as work was done was partly where things were

available.

Blum: For the renovation?

Korista: For the renovation, and part of that might have been out of his direct control.

Blum: Well, John Vinci and Larry Kenny did quite a bit in the Trading Room.

Korista: It was a combined effort of things there.

Blum: Where did the idea to move the Trading Room to the Art Institute come

from?

Korista: I think it was because they were tearing down trading rooms and people

were horrified. That was before the historic preservation people got strong

enough to say, "Hey, don't tear this down." So that one got torn down before

anybody paid too much attention other than the gentleman that

unfortunately died when he was over there.

Blum: The photographer? [Richard Nickel]

Korista: He kind of did bring attention to all historic preservation, not that people

weren't interested before, but the idea of standing up and making noise

about… Wait a minute, we shouldn't tear this all down. And of course, not

too long after that they did a building over there where they left the bottom

of the building and put a brand new skyscraper above it. It's over on LaSalle

Street. I'm just saying it was a spin-off of that. But that was, in my career,

when historical preservationists doing battle with Chicago authorities really

took off.

Blum: I think I remember that the building was up for sale for six million dollars,

and today that looks like a pittance.

Korista: Yeah, somebody did buy it and they tore it down. And that's unfortunate

because there was probably ways in which you could have built over it using

air rights and you could have still left the trading hall. But again, over at the

Art Institute it bounced around SOM, but generally there were a lot of

renovations that we did there.

Blum: Was that new space where the Trading Room was installed?

Korista: I'll say part of it was, because we redid the whole east wall there under one of

the renovations, and it wasn't like a massive increase in space. But the whole

exterior wall was redone and in some places, twenty- or thirty-feet into the

building, were increased. So I don't think the whole room was new space. It

was part of another renovation that was going on that created enough

volume to what they put in there, because it did come after that. So there was

a whole series of things here that we were working on.

Blum: How early were you called in to this job, this multi-faceted job at the Art

Institute?

Korista: For renovations?

Blum: Renovation, addition.

Korista: Usually right away, because somebody wants to do something––it wasn't just

architectural. Oh, couldn't we take this floor out? Or couldn't we take this

wall out?

Blum: And that required your expertise.

Korista: It takes structural engineering, yeah. I'm sure there was a lot of renovations

that have gone on where somebody just said, Okay, we're going to take this

room and we're going to paint it blue instead of pink; and we're going to take

this art and put it over here. That goes on all the time. But the ones we were

in were usually… Well, we have to make two-story space here, or we have to

take these old skylights and move them over there, and things of that ilk,

where you were actually physically changing whatever was here. Sometimes

it was old and sometimes it wasn't so old. The School of the Art Institute was

almost pure add-on. There wasn't hardly any demolition to that.

Blum: At that time, the president of the Art Institute was Leigh Block, and people

who have worked with him have said he's rather difficult to work with. How

did Walter and you get on with him?

Korista: Certainly I never had any problem with him, but I'm sure Walter had much

greater exposure to him as far as that goes.

Blum: I wonder how you got his approval for some of the changes at the school and

the museum.

Korista: As I recall on that, it was kind of a discussion that went on and on and on,

and it finally got down to we want to do this, and I don't agree with that, but

I agree with that and I agree that we need to get on with it. I think probably

there were quite a few changes during construction. I think people from the

Art Institute were still debating exactly what they wanted it to look like or

how it fitted in. That's true of every job. Someone in the hierarchy of the

client who decides to have the most input, or is given the chance to have the

most input, then changes whatever he wants. So sometimes, especially with

museums and so forth, a lot of times you are working with the president or

the director. Now sometimes he's the director of operations, sometimes he's

pure and simply the chairman of something. So it varies.

Blum: Well, I've had the impression that Leigh Block was quite involved with the

addition and the renovation.

Korista: Right. Oh yeah, he was involved in a lot of the little ones. He'd come and yell

at people, and then all of a sudden a couple of days later he was, "Oh, I see

what you're doing." He'd come in and observe somebody chopping the floor

out, and all these wood posts all around, and get all excited about it. Then

he'd go back and somebody would tell him what we're doing, then he'd think

it was a great idea.

Blum: Well, that must have been unsettling for you and the workers.

Korista: Sure. But those are just…

Blum: Why was the arch set in the garden?

Korista: There's no reason other than, I'll say again, that there were a series of

personal opinions about where it should go.

Blum: Is it's placement Walter's idea?

Korista: I certainly remember cases where he was involved, but there were certain

people from the Art Institute that were discussing it, and there were others

that were just discussing. Working here, it wasn't just the SOM architectural

team. There were a lot of times other architects also did some work.

Blum: Other firms?

Korista: Other firms or other architects. There are a lot of architects there that are not

necessarily representing a firm. They have their opinion, and there seemed to

be times in which all of a sudden there was other architects around. For a lot

of time, the Art Institute had people that were called––and they actually were

by training architects––I forget what their titles were. So there were people

commenting besides just the president of the Art Institute.

Blum: So who did you deal with mostly?

Korista: Usually we dealt with whoever the curator was for that particular area of art

that was going to be disturbed by whatever we were doing. So a lot of times,

besides dying that they had to move all the things, which obviously happens,

it seemed that we always told, "Oh, geez, do we have to move them?" And

then we had to put them back up again. There are some heavy pieces of

sculpture in this building where we've had to actually reinforce floors,

because it goes from here over to there in a different room, and the other

room won't come close to taking the weight of the piece of artwork. I won't

say it's sculpture, but artwork. So it was very interesting.

Blum: Well, speaking of sculpture and artwork, there's a Noguchi sculpture,

Fountain, on the east side of the building. Did you have anything to do with

it?

Korista: This is the flowing water stone piece in the pool. We were involved with that

when we first put it up there and ever since then. Right now I think maybe

people have given up on it, but the idea was to create this… It's a long piece

of stone, polished granite I believe. It was achieving a sheet of water that

would move along it, move around it. By surface tension it would appear

that it was just like glass, but it was moving glass. And that was a function, at

least in his ideas. We had to tip it enough so that water would run, but you

couldn't tip it very fast because the velocity of the water relative to the

water's viscosity creates its own tension that grips things so it didn't just slide

off in drops. He wanted the sheet and the sheet had to go all around it. So we

built the undercarriage for it, because it was a quite heavy piece of stone.

Over the years as it had sat on its own foundation footing in the ground, it

actually settled a little bit, and it was just that settlement which was less than

a quarter of inch from one end to the other completely disrupted the flow of

the water. So it was actually breaking the surface tension and dripping off

versus the sheet flowing down. It was jacked up and recalibrated over and

over, and it was very difficult, because besides just where it was, the wind, if

there was a little breeze, that would tend to disrupt this surface. I forget how

long it was––thirty-feet or forty-feet long––they were trying to create this, the

water is trying to hang onto this piece both lengthwise and circularwise and

it's not the same water. The water was actually flowing, but his idea was to

make it look like a sheet, so it wasn't water dripping off, it was a film of water

around it and you could see it moving.

Blum: And it is placed in its own pond.

Korista: It was in a pond. We created a lot of small ponds, very small ponds. And

there were problems with that. This kind of tile was used at the base of the

pond and the waterproofing would leak, and then we put in a different type

of tile and re-waterproofed it. For outdoor sculptures there is definitely a

maintenance program with them. The fancier they are the more difficult they

are. The Picasso was something that was built outside of metal on Daley

Plaza. Picasso was made to be outside. We used Cor-Ten steel on it, which

actually rusts, and that's what Picasso wanted to do. So it'll just continue on,

short of someone physically painting it or defacing it, that will just continue

on for years to get a patina.

Blum: Was that to be sympathetic with the material in the Daley Center building?

Korista: It was, but I think he was primarily interested in this being a steel structure.

Blum: A Cor-ten steel structure?

Korista: Bill Hartmann brought a lot of art to Chicago, including this Picasso. Picasso

thought steel in Chicago was something that fit. I won't try to defend what he

thought that figure is, but steel in Chicago was something he thought was

right, maybe because of the steel industry in the Chicago area. I don't know,

but he wanted it in steel, whatever it was.

Blum: Who suggested Cor-ten?

Korista: We had suggested Cor-ten steel because obviously it was similar to what the

Daley Center building was and it was okay with him for that. Again, it takes

very little maintenance. Now they have had plaza problems but the Picasso

takes very little maintenance. Right across the street next to the Brunswick

building is a Miro. The Miro is the one sculpture where we only had a very,

very small model that he had created and it was hard to give proportionality

to it. He had created this maquette.

Blum: And then how was it enlarged?

Korista: Well, that was kind of the time of the beginning of reasonable computer

usage and computer graphics, so we actually had it taken to, I think it went

to Rush Memorial Hospital and they used a CAT scan. So in the CAT scan we

divided it up in pieces, this maquette. Then we used the computer, an early

type of computer graphics then to blow it up to a reasonable size. Then we

took that and basically put dimensionality to it. Miro finally agreed that the

pieces were dimensional, reasonable. His idea was as high as it is, which is

forty-feet high or something like that. It's of course a shape with things

hanging out this way and that way. So we got him to agree to that

proportion.

Blum: He had little pieces of tile in some of these depressions.

Korista: Yeah, and that was part of his thing. Structurally, I spent a lot of time on that

because he did not have any engineers working with him. So he just would

say, "Okay now, that's what I want." That's what quite a few people do. So we

devised a methodology for actually holding this thing up.

Blum: It's sheltered in that alcove between the buildings.

Korista: Yeah, but I mean, that's unfortunately quite a windy area sometimes. Winds

do come down the buildings and it gets trapped in there, so it is actually

quite windy. We had to watch out what we were doing. So we actually built

a structure for it. There's actually some structural steel in the middle of it, and

then we have a heavy wire mesh, almost like chicken wire, that then, was

74 covered not with plaster but a material similar to plaster. Then that was carved out in these areas in which he wanted to have the tiles and it worked out. The difficulty with that one is because Chicago air gets dirty. There's been no great thoughts about cleaning the pieces that aren't tile because it's kind of a rough surface, so they kind of wash out the tile and wash off the base. But again, there's a maintainability to that one. Chagall, we weren't involved in the original Chagall on, at that time, the First National Plaza, again, which is all tile work. But about twenty years ago now it became very obvious that they'd repaired it two or three times because the acidity in the city urban air was causing these tiles to delaminate. The Chagall was out there by itself so there could be rain on it, and there was ice and snow, and freeze and thaw. Several times large sections of tile just came off and they tried different kinds of adhesives. So SOM was brought in to do that roof that's over it now, which is a glass roof. Basically at one time we were looking at having glass sides totally but no one really liked it because that would keep people from wandering in and out easily. So we wound up with just the roof, now that must have been late eighties when we built it, and I think they've only done one minor repair to the tile since then. So it did help a lot that it was covered. One of the worst parts was the top because it would just collect snow and it would freeze, and ice and water. Then it would get underneath the tile and just kind of come down the sides and pop those tiles out. So again you could say with kinds of tile sculpture in a northern climate you've got to be careful because the maintainability is very high. So metal, steel, bronze, heavy metals that people are interested in letting them weather when they're outside probably take very little maintenance, other than to

treat disfigurement by vandalism. They were there and they worked very

well. I worked on several outside [Alexander] Calders, and he likes to do his

red paint, and he's done it in quite a few places where he's done these plate

structures. And yes, it has very little maintainability, although you do have to

eventually repaint it to keep it kind of fresh looking. So it's not just pure

natural things.

Blum: Was Chagall agreeable to the idea of a glass tent?

Korista: Yeah. Well, I think he didn't want to see the thing destroyed, and it was

getting to be where it was like, we've got to take this thing down. Because it

wasn't cheap to repair, it wasn't like he had 50,000 more of these tiles. He

wanted those tiles, not to just go out and find another tile, because these

came from Spain somewhere, or Europe somewhere, wherever he got them.

It was like they'd fall off the side and they'd break on the granite pavers that

are out there. Okay, now what do you do? Well, he wanted those glued back

together and put back on. He just didn't want substitutes to go on there. Of

course Chagall was over here when it was actually done. SOM was not

involved when he originally did it. He was here and actually put the patterns

where he wanted them. Then when they started coming off he couldn't

always say if a section that came off looked like that, for whatever reason.

Okay now you've got a pile of pieces down there. Some of them broken and

some of them not, okay, where do you put them back?

Blum: Like a puzzle!

Korista: Yeah, he was a true sculpture artist, most of which are individuals. It's not

like he had a company that he could send three of his people over here to do

it. So I think he agreed to the top, because he did make it to be exposed to the

elements. That was his idea; it wasn't to be something inside. So to say that he

totally agreed… I think it was compromise. The compromise was going to be

that it had to be torn down and it never could be put back together

anywhere. So that means it would be just destroyed, or try to protect it from

weather in a reasonable way.

Blum: Of the sculptures you are just talking about, outdoor sculptures, Picasso did

not come here, Chagall I think did, but what about Miro?

Korista: Miro came once. Chagall was out there putting the tiles in, the way I

understand it. Our office was across the street, so I think I saw him out there

doing it. He actually came and was instructing the people where to put the

different colors. Again, I don't know what his exact idea of what it was, but

he had that idea. Miro came once after the fact, so the rest of the stuff was by

pictures. Bill Hartmann was involved in a lot of these outdoor sculptures or

artwork in Chicago, and in some other places where we've done some. We

had another category of things that I found interesting that were structural

where we were doing a building, and the building owner or the building

manager/developer went out to find artwork, and for a time that was

interesting and important especially to the speculative developers. They'd cut

everything out in the building, but if they could get a good piece of art in

their lobby, that was a very positive thing. SOM as a firm was not really

dealing with them, and about the only one from SOM who was dealing with

it was the structural engineer who was trying to get this piece of whatever it

was hung or supported somehow in the building.

Blum: Did SOM have anything to do with the [Richard] Lippold sculpture that's in

the lobby of the Inland Steel building?

Korista: That was before my time, but that was actually coordinated by SOM, from an

architectural technology standpoint. From a structural engineering

standpoint, it was primarily just the weight of the pool.

Blum: Oh, it looks like the rods are just suspended there floating in space.

Korista: But that was probably one that didn't necessarily take a lot of structural

expertise. Architects and sculptors don't always get together that much.

Sculptors like to do their artwork and the architect does not always agree that

it should be there or not be there. So with a lot of these the sculptor has very

little interplay with the architect. Sometimes the architect is instrumental in

bringing it to fruition.

Blum: Where did SOM's connection with artists' outdoor sculpture begin?

Korista: I think that goes farther back than my career at SOM. I think in the period of

the end of the thirties when the firm started, and the forties, even with the

war, there was more interest in sculpture. Then the fifties and sixties it was

kind of post-war, and people wanted to get going, and the nuances and the

fineness and some of the cultural aesthetics would kind of snowball for a

while. And then it was more like in the seventies and eighties where people

got a bunch of new things built. "Oh, we can do that!" And they started

sitting back and saying, "Well, wait a minute now. What did we overrun

here?" Really, when you look at outdoor sculpture you see a lot of things that

were built in the twenties or thirties or before, even in Chicago all our

monuments to the presidents and other great people. But those are kind of

way back there, so it was a period of time that those things were important.

But there was a period of time when not much outdoor/indoor sculpture,

other than maybe at the Art Institute, was really done in Chicago. You might

see nice things––there was still art going on––but usually it was private

people owning the art. But in buildings or outdoors, besides the cost of those

things, there wasn't really much added for a period of time.

Blum: Noguchi was Gordon Bunshaft's artist of choice. He was the sculptor for the

School of the Art Institute's Fountain. How did Noguchi come to do

something here in Chicago?

Korista: Well, I don't know. I wasn't always present on these, so I can only surmise

that people have an interest in cities. Artists do have an interest in cities

besides when they're brought in to do something. Most of the time in the

things I've been involved with, there was someone that was interested in

their artwork that then gets them interested in the city.

Blum: And who pays for it?

Korista: And that pay for it, yeah.

Blum: Well, I was thinking it was SOM's connection that brought Noguchi's work

here.

Korista: It may very well be, because I mean a lot of times it was some connection to

SOM. But you could say, well, did Bill Hartmann, because I know that he

brought more than what Gordon Bunshaft brought, did Bill Hartmann know

all of these people personally? I don't know. Was he really interested

architecturally in all of them? I don't know. Was he interested in promoting?

For a while he was very interested in promoting public artwork and trying to

get that restimulated.

Blum: And there was a tax program too, wasn't there? One Percent for Art, or three

percent or whatever percentage that was?

Korista: There is. It gets a little bit ridiculous, but people even now when you're

developing your final FAR amount of space you can build on. So if you've

got a plot of land how much space you can build on that, that's called a FAR.

So the city restricts the area, and the area may restrict the height and the

number of floors, in simple terms, and even today there are things like if you

provide sculpture or you provide green on setback roofs, then you get a little

more FAR. This means you can build one more floor or two more floors.

Blum: Taller, I see.

Korista: So if you build one more floor, two more floors, then you think downstream,

okay, my rental for that is this, and the artwork is going to cost this much and

that's good for me. So that's a good benefit because it brings in artwork.

Blum: So that's an incentive.

Korista: It's an incentive, certainly. Now some people do that, and for a while,

probably in the eighties or nineties there were a lot of people taking

advantage of it.

Blum: It wasn't mandatory?

Korista: No. It was optional, so if you wanted to pay for a piece of artwork and

dedicate a certain space for artwork, then you could do this or that. That's

still true today.

Blum: On the list of your projects there was something mentioned, a project with

Richard Hunt, the sculptor. Where was that located?

Korista: I had met him several times, just in passing, and so forth. I was kind of

always interested in his work because his work was basically stainless or

steel things. It was really, I think, not that long ago, within the last ten years,

he came to SOM, he just wandered in and wondered whether we'd look at

structural engineering for him, for one sculpture he has over in Indiana right

on the lakefront.

Blum: In Michigan City?

Korista: No, not Michigan City, St. Joseph, excuse me. Right down they have a big

public beach area there. I think it's quite nice. I don't want to try to describe

it, he had a name for it [And You, Seas]. We helped him. It was relatively tall.

It's right down on the lake so it's out in the wind. You had to have a

significant foundation for it, so we did the foundation, and it's right up

against the waterway, so the Corps of Engineers got involved with the thing.

It became a long extended thing for him to get this thing.

[Tape 2: Side B]

Blum: You were saying Richard Hunt makes his own sculptures.

Korista: He gets actively involved in his own sculptures. He doesn't cut the pieces or

weld them with welders, but he's in the shop all the time, and he's got his

office in his shop where he builds these. And most of his work is out of

metals and especially steel. He does a lot of smaller stuff, but this was a good

size one. Another one that's out at the Midway Airport, is part of the later

Midway expansion. I think it's toward the southwest corner.

Blum: Are you talking about where the sculpture is located?

Korista: Yeah, of Midway Airport after the latest expansion out at the southwest

corner he has a relatively large metal sculpture set up on top of a concrete

base. He didn't build it exactly like what we told him, and we were doing the

structural engineering part of it. To him, he's not interested in that, he's

interested in the steel plates, and so forth. But he knows when he gets beyond

that things that are big or tall or are kind of too eccentric, he'd probably better

get somebody to look at the thing. Because otherwise, he just puts stainless

steel plates together and welds them. He has a small steel fabrication shop

and they do generally good work. But it's not an engineered product, it’s just

you put the pieces together.

Blum: Did you do the engineering on these other pieces, in St. Joseph?

Korista: St. Joe and the one at Midway. For the Midway one we did the foundation

system. For this one at Midway we had to get a permit for it through the city

of Chicago just like you were doing a building, because it had a foundation

system. So I've always found this whole collection of things: Calder at Sears

Tower, the inside Calders, the ones that move. I wasn't so much involved the

first time around, but we've gone through and remodeled those things

probably three times, because they're all moving pieces of sculpture, the ones

at the west end.

Blum: The west end of Sears.

Korista: And as long as things are moving, after a period of time, if you really want to

keep them moving nicely, not jerking around––that one thing which looks

like it just screws itself into the wall––all those things get unbalanced, and

then they either hang up on one side because they get unbalanced, or the

thing starts to tear itself out. So we've actually redone those things, I think,

three times.

Blum: So they need maintenance.

Korista: They need maintenance, but again, you get the chance to work with

sculptural artwork from a structural standpoint, because we had to take these

things apart and figure out the next best way of supporting them so they

would be in balance. We didn't destroy his artwork, but worked on how they

were supported.

Blum: Did SOM have anything to do with Calder's Flamingo that's in the Federal

Plaza near the post office in Chicago?

Korista: No. Well, I've worked on a couple that I would say was almost exactly like

the Flamingo but somewhere else.

Blum: Where is it located?

Korista: In Grand Rapids, Michigan. They have one that's very, very similar to

Chicago. I forget what he called it. That was probably the first time, and

actually on that one I did meet him. We did Grand Rapids. Oh, this goes way

back to the late sixties, one of the early projects I worked on. We did a new

city hall and county hall, and somehow somebody up there got in contact

with Calder and we did one of these. I'll say it's similar to the Flamingo; to me

it was very similar. That one we did. Actually we did the engineering for

him; we connected the plates together, and put the foundations in, and it's

painted almost the same red color. It's still there. It still looks very nice.

They've torn down parts of the buildings that we built for them, but this

plaza area is still there. Grand Rapids is one city that's just now coming back;

they're doing a lot of downtown redevelopment.

Blum: I think we began to speak about art and sculpture because of the Art Institute

job and the piece of sculpture there, and you were working with Walter. One

of the other projects that you were involved with was the University of

Illinois Chicago campus. Was it the Behavioral Science building?

Korista: Behavioral Science building at the University of Illinois. That's on the west

side.

Blum: What was the challenge for you there?

Korista: It was one of the first ones in the first two or three phases. We also did the

[Art and] Architecture building that he basically… They were very different

types of buildings, but they were still rectilinear. There were several

classroom buildings, they were called classroom buildings, other than his

main arena. The outdoor arena which has so far, mostly been taken apart,

and the administration building which is the one high-rise, which is

rectilinear.

Blum: But it's got a smaller base than the top. It's inverted.

Korista: It's inverted, but it's still a rectilinear building. Art and Architecture started

that way. Behavioral Science was the first one he tried to extend his Field

Theory, or to the structural engineers, started rotating things all the way

around it. That's quite a large horizontal building. It has a lot of area into it

for the fact that, whatever it is, three- or four- stories high. So therefore you

get a lot of edges where you wouldn't expect an edge. A normal building is

rectangular on the outside, and there's cladding on it, and you're kind of

done. This started to have a lot of edges and windows in unusual places. That

was a project I worked all the way through on it from start to finish. I think it

turned out quite nice. That was the first one over there that he really got

away from the more or less what you would say traditional school buildings,

which are kind of rectangular and kind of ordinary inside.

Blum: When that campus, with the Forum which I think Walter was rather pleased

with, when that needed renovation or upkeep, I'm not sure which, Walter

wasn't called in to do it, and he was very offended because of that.

Korista: Very honestly, the U. of I. campus physical construction started about 1960

and we were still involved in new buildings, probably up through 1972 or so.

And then even after that we came back and did the University of Illinois

arena or stadium, whatever you call it over there. That was an SOM project

that was kind of after the fact, but for the first ten or fifteen years we were

involved with the university doing retrofitting work. Now the big change,

when they talk about changing the Forum and changing the style of

buildings, part of that was monetarily driven and part of that was just

architects finally wanting to disagree with Walter's ideas of what a university

should be came to a forefront.

Blum: Well, I think another feature of the campus was the bridges.

Korista: The granite bridges.

Blum: From building to building, and of course the criticism was offered, in a city

like Chicago with the kind of winter weather we have, how can that be

useful?

Korista: But you know, I'm the one that took care of those for about fifteen years

because we did go out there on those. They were big granite slabs and

87 basically the granite is not going to do anything, but they sat on concrete piers and they had granite parapets. It was all granite, so it was all natural granite, and there were big, huge slabs of granite. There wasn't any strength problems with it, but again, there was a maintainability of it, and not so much maintainability of the granite, which was probably already five million years old, it was the joints between these. There was always natural leakage.

Now when we originally put those up, they had actually started a system where they would have rotary bristle brushes rather than snow plows with blades on them. They agreed not to put deicing salts on the thing, that they would get up there and they'd have these bristle brushes. You've seen them on the streets of Chicago now they use them, they kind of blow the snow over to the side so you could walk on them. Well, that very simply didn't last too long because it was easier and cheaper probably to have a lot of little John

Deere tractors with blades on them and just scoop them. Well, that means every time they went over a joint, which was every thirty feet I think, it would start to knock a joint or mar the joint, because they weren't all in perfect alignment. Pretty soon, like all of us, you shouldn't even use on concrete walks, not only rock salt, which is the old thing, but they put these deicing salts on it. Well, deicing salt eats up anything and everything in the way, so all the joints which had some metal in them, even with stainless, started to erode terribly. They didn't live up to their maintainability, therefore they became very difficult. That to me is why they did it. I thought the bridges were very good because in an urban area, especially in an urban area that at the start was not the best neighborhood to be in. It wasn't, okay?

It simply wasn't. They tore down a lot of things over there and there was that

whole discussion about tearing down things, and it's still going on today.

Okay, so forty-five years later, whenever the U. of I. tears down the next set

of hundred-year old homes over there then they expand but you know

when we first started it was a little bit of a derelict area. Letting people move

across campus above grade, I thought was very nice. You were up there; and

there was a lot of good landscaping.

Blum: Because of the bridges?

Korista: Yeah, because these granite bridges, they were bridges, but they were made

out of granite stones. There was no concrete, just pieces of stone.

Blum: Didn't they have some chains on the side?

Korista: Well, some of them did; some of them had granite parapets. Sometimes

they'd get damaged. Okay, but it was because people tried to damage them.

They'd take a sledgehammer and hit them.

Blum: Was it just sporadic vandalism or calculated destruction?

Korista: Yeah, vandalism. There was that element on that part of the near west side or

southwest side. When U. of I. was built it was nowhere near as calm as it is

today. And it was a hard neighborhood. To go over there just when we were

building buildings, you go over there and park your car, or you don't park

your car but you kind of watch it. There wasn't all the transit systems that go

over there and drop people off when we were building that thing. So getting

people up off the bottom level, to walk between these things was kind of all

focused because you actually passed through buildings; you could walk

through buildings on it. I thought it was beautiful.

Blum: How much did Mayor [Richard J.] Daley have to do with the location and the

plan and all of that?

Korista: Of the campus itself?

Blum: Yes.

Korista: Oh, I think the original Mayor Daley had a lot to do with where the city of

Chicago was going to allow the university to build. It wasn't that you just

took an arbitrary location, oh, I don't like that one; I can go someplace else.

But I won't speak for whoever was the board. There was a lot and there still

are ongoing parts of the original debates between the schools that are already

here. At that time Northwestern was concerned that it would draw other

people away. IIT was very concerned that they'd lose all their student base if

University of Illinois came up here and built a major campus, let alone the

smaller schools like Roosevelt. So there was a lot of that discussion, and

there's still things that the University of Illinois at Chicago can't do, because

they've agreed for a long time not to do some things. All the way from how

many Ph.D. programs to––it's getting pretty much used up––but for the first

twenty or thirty years a lot of their athletic programs never went anywhere

because there was an agreement not to compete. They still don't compete.

Like there's a Big Ten an on athletic level, well, Northwestern is part of the

Big Ten even though it's a private school. But U. of I. Chicago has never been

able to. They compete now. At first they couldn't have any athletic school

teams, and then they slowly have come up. But they're still at a level down

from the University of Illinois in Champaign or Northwestern. And some of

the Ph.D. programs, they weren't allowed to have those for a period of years.

It wasn't just you couldn't find something; they weren't allowed to offer those

programs. So that, plus, I'm sure the mayor had a lot to say that he wanted it

there versus he wanted it northwest of where it is right now.

Blum: I see. So what was it like working with Walter?

Korista: There were several architects; Harry Weese was involved. I think, most of the

Chicago architects of any distinction were basically talking about doing it,

but Walter really did the original master plan and got it sold. That was right

before I got there. But he got it sold. Whatever people think in the future,

very honestly, I think it's kind of unfortunate that so any––and that not only

happens at the Illinois campus in Chicago––but so many other schools have

taken a strange look at his university endeavors, especially in Chicago.

Blum: Well, I know he was very upset by its reception.

Korista: Northwestern is somewhat rolled into this––you know he did four or five

buildings up there, but they've taken a lot of––maybe they were just

following what people were detracting on the University of Illinois in

Chicago, but there have certainly been detractions up there.

Blum: Well, I didn't realize he had done as many academic institutions as you're

describing.

Korista: Oh, he did a lot. We worked in the mid-seventies, we worked all over. Again,

how he got involved I don't know, but he was starting to look at overseas

jobs. We did three university campuses and two of them were actually built

in Algeria. And these were projects that weren't huge buildings, but they

were campuses of 30,000 students.

Blum: Did you work with him on those projects?

Korista: Yeah. That was an introduction to Algeria. At that time the French army was

still in control. That's not the way it is now, but the University of Blida was

actually completed and there's like ninety buildings. Then we did the

University of Blida teaching hospital, which was about thirty buildings, and

they're just outside of Blida, which is southwest of Algiers. And then we did

one at Tizi-Ouzou, which is about 200 miles southwest of Algiers. These were

full campuses where we did everything; and we did Annaba, a later one in

Algeria. So Walter turned out a lot of work for those campuses that you don't

ever hear about because Algeria had its own problems. But these universities

are still functioning today.

Blum: They are little known. What were some of the principal differences between

American universities and those in Algeria?

Korista: The buildings weren't as massive as this, but they were still all engineered

buildings in concrete, and stadiums, and residential halls. Maybe they were

only three-stories high rather than five or six-stories high, but yeah, they built

them all.

Blum: Were you in on the ground floor in this kind of project?

Korista: Oh yeah, sure, because he said those things that we were going to do; he was

interested in how you design it but not whatever materials you wanted to

use. So he didn't particularly want to deal with the… At that time the French

army did all the government construction and the universities were under

the government, so actually all our meetings and so forth were with the

French government, French army.

Blum: Oh, so the French army was the client for all of these?

Korista: Contractor, well, they were the client and the contractor.

Blum: I see, and then how did you communicate with them? Did you go there? Did

they come here?

Korista: We mostly had to go there. For a while SOM actually had a group in Blida:

we had two structural engineers, and there was probably twelve architects

and a couple of mechanical/electrical engineers.

Blum: Who headed that office?

Korista: Larry Oltmans, who was one of the younger architectural people that worked

with Walter a lot on this. He actually lived over there. And a lot of them were

French-speaking in some way. Larry's wife was from France, and since we

had to do all the drawings in French we had an opportunity to get French-

speaking people here, so we had quite a few French-speaking people.

Blum: Oh, that's an interesting twist.

Korista: And then some of us just learned enough that we could pay attention to what

was on the drawings and understand it.

Blum: And you?

Korista: That was me. I could understand it and read it, but that was a long time ago.

Blum: Well, then there is an extensive list of educational buildings and campuses

that you worked on with Walter.

Korista: Yeah, I worked with all of them. I loved to build things and not just master

plan them. When people said, "Well, here's a chance," I never said "No, I only

want to work on a tall building," or "I don't want to work on educational

buildings." So I think the rewarding part was working with these different

people, different partners in SOM, and a wide variety of buildings. That's the

part I loved.

Blum: Could you have refused a job if you didn't want it?

Korista: Well, I think I probably could have, but I didn't want to. Sometimes I

probably took on too much, but some people don't want to do that. I'd say I

don't know what was in Hal Iyengar's book when you talked to him, but…

Blum: We have it here if you'd like to look.

Korista: Well, maybe I should look one of these days.

Blum: I'll bring it out for you.

Korista: Hal's interest was SOM. But his interest was more along the development, a

continuation of Faz Khan's thing, which was more along the development of

high-rises. Most of the work he did was high-rises. And most of the work at

SOM he did was with Bruce Graham. And there was a time set. Hal's older

than I am so he was before me, and he was a bridge between Faz and when I

got there, and I'm a bridge between them and Bill Baker. So there were

different time sets of doing things, but I always enjoyed working with

different partners doing different things, and that was my reward as much as

anything else.

Blum: Well, you're very flexible and cooperative.

Korista: So we went all over the world. Walter did a couple of master plans down in

Malaysia that were not built. Walter and his group did a complete master

plan just outside of Cairo, which is Helwan University, and which was built.

Even though SOM wasn't involved with the building of it, it more or less

followed Walter's master plan for that. For a while we were operating in Iran,

and he did a master plan for––I only know it as its acronym, it's called BASU

[Bu-Ali Sina] University, B-A-S-U. That again, it was like a campus of thirty

or forty buildings for which we did all the working drawings. About the time

they were starting to build it the events of 1978-79 came, and that ended

people from the U.S. being able to be involved in projects in Iran. But we

actually had an office there for a while while we were doing work in Iran.

One of those projects happened to be Walter's. It was more of an

"agricultural" university, so it had technology and agriculture. It had a lot of

petroleum engineering, because obviously oil was a big deal in the central

western part of Iran.

Blum: Was that ever built?

Korista: Yeah! But we weren't involved there. We did all the drawings and then 1979

came with the embassy and all that stuff, so anybody from the U.S. had to get

out of there.

Blum: But they used your drawings when it was built?

Korista: They actually used our drawings and built it. The Shah got out of there, but

they said, "These plans are good so go ahead and build it." We had several

projects in Iran––not all Walter's projects––that we had designed and they

were just starting construction, and at that time, 1978-79, then politics became

too difficult to deal with. Well, the Shah was getting deposed and thrown

out, but they took our drawings and built several buildings. We had twin

high-rises that was being done in Teheran, which was about a thirty-five-

story high-rise, which is still tall for that time. We had it up about thirty-

stories, and trouble came up. Because everybody presumed anything that

was new was somehow part of the Shah, they proceeded to, the militias or

whoever, proceeded to shoot twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft shells at it for a

while for target practice. But they didn't knock it all the way down, and that

was 1970. In 1998, Bouygues, which is a large French contractor, actually was

recontracted by the Iranian government, and they wanted to finish the

project, and they finished it in about two years. They asked whether we

wanted to be involved, but really the U.S. cannot operate in Iran, even today.

So we declined, but they actually finished it according to our drawings, and

I've seen pictures of it and it's beautiful. It was a good piece of architecture.

Now that wasn't one of Walter's projects, but I'm just saying there are things

in the world like that that we've been involved with but we haven't been able

to follow all the way through.

Blum: You began and then were not allowed to finish.

Korista: Which always bothers me because I like to follow it all the way through and

see it done.

Blum: Well, you have worked with Myron, Walter, and the person who usually got

a lot of attention for his design was Bruce. You worked with Bruce on the

Wills Tobacco plant near London. How did that come about?

Korista: Well, as you say, Bruce, again, was another personality. He certainly had a

very aggressive personality, was very astute businesswise, and also an

architect. So you have architects that become project partners or project-

oriented that only do business and forget their architecture. Bruce was kind

of both––he was an architectural designer and he also liked to make a lot of

money. So he was very astute at business and attracting clients and making

them feel at ease. That he could do. The money––he was able to get the

money and to use it in the right places. So especially in the sixties and

seventies, he was quite attractive to people who were doing speculative office

buildings or office buildings. They were looking for somebody that wanted

to hear their side of it; that you didn't make the most ornate thing that cost so

much money that you could never build it. And that's a little bit about what

the John Hancock Center and Sears are about. They were big organizations

that wanted to build and they knew it'd cost a lot of money if you made it

very, very meticulous. Now add into that equation Fazlur Khan who just

happened to be on the scene and was interested in tall buildings. I think that

the marriage of Fazlur Khan and Bruce Graham relative to tall buildings was

a circumstance that just happened and led its way forward. It let both of

those people really lead the way. First job I worked with Bruce on was

actually up in Wisconsin. I was quite young in my career so I was kind of

pleased that he came one day and said, "Okay, you're going to do it." It was

probably the second time I ever met Bruce Graham, the project was First

Wisconsin National Bank in Milwaukee, and it's still the tallest building up

there. It's the big white building that has diagonalized areas where the

mechanical systems are. So I think it's still quite a nice building. But that was

a fifty-story building, so that was my first big building that he just said,

"Okay, you're going to do it." He tended to operate that way. When you're an

architect you just walk up and say, "Okay, you're going to do it."

Blum: Was this the ground floor of the project?

Korista: Oh yeah, I was getting in on the ground floor, but he'd just come around and

make these announcements like, "Well, you're going to do it." Now, he might

say, "You're going to do it my way," but "You're going to do it."

Blum: But he meant that it would be his way.

Korista: Yes, he meant that. And if you didn't do it, then he'd tell you that you didn't

do it. He was from Colombia, and he had the personality of, not a North

American, but of a South American, which was, I'll say, somewhat more

volatile than someone from the Midwest, and that carried over in all his

work. A lot of it was good because his volatile kind of personality was

intense, so the intensity created better architecture to come out of the other

end. On the other hand, you talked earlier about sensitivity. Well, most of his

project teams probably were a little bit worried about sensitivity.

Blum: From the way you're describing him, how did he and Faz get on? They

seemed to be so compatible or at least cooperative.

Korista: Very well. And I think part of it is because, certainly Bruce had the urge to do

this and was very good working with clients. And Faz, probably for a

structural engineer also tended to be an outward personality. As you

probably will see, as you interview engineers, not all engineers, just by

nature… They don't have an open personality as much as architects do, or an

outward personality. But I think it was happening between those people.

They were compatible by personal chemistry, they were interested in

pushing the envelope, which we all are. But you've got to put the right

circumstances together: either by what's being done out there, what's

possible, how much money, is there a recession or not. And they just got

together at the right point in time. Faz didn't come to SOM because of Bruce

Graham; they just got there at the right time. Bruce probably wouldn't have

just done only high-rise buildings, but Faz was there, they were interested in

100 it, and they started building. And Hal fed into that equation; I probably fed into the equation after that, and Bill Baker now has fed into that equation especially on tall buildings. So the history goes on. But Bruce, again, was to me a completely different personality. His wants, desires, what he thought about architecture was very much different from Myron, who was a very gentle person and very technically thinking. "Well, can't you make this thing then, maybe we need to think about it three times?" To Walter that was very aggressive, but I said he was intellectual-aggressive. To me he was thinking more of the global scale, the master scale of things. And Bruce was very aggressive as an architect, but he got into the tall buildings and that turned out to be his love of things. So he could come up with very ornate details, but most of the time, at least after the sixties when he got into tall buildings, you weren't always able to do like before. They weren't corporate office buildings, so people weren't always going to give you all the money you wanted.

Getting back to Wills Tobacco [Bristol, England], it was probably one of the last corporate buildings that he was involved with. It was an office building and a manufacturing center for Imperial Tobacco or Wills Tobacco. I won't say I know exactly where the link got in there, but the link was Bruce, and I think Bill Hartmann was involved with that with a group of architects and engineers in the U.K. and the owner. It was an exciting project; it was an overseas project. We didn't do all of the drawings for it; we did most of the structural design drawings for the big manufacturing plant. Faz Khan was involved in that, and we had some big cable-supported roofs. Some were similar to McCormick Place, where we have the pylons and the cables. So it wasn't just an ordinary manufacturing building. And we had a chance to

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learn something about the cigarette industry although that's not necessarily a

great thing to think about now, but it was then. At about the same point in

time, our New York office, in fact, Gordon Bunshaft was heavily involved

with Philip Morris down in Virginia and doing their magnificent plant they

had down there, so we were off in the world of tobacco.

Blum: Corporate buildings funded by tobacco, yes!

Korista: But it was interesting, and then part of the Wills Tobacco was they wanted to

do their own corporate office building. They were out in the open areas, it

wasn't an urban area, so they had beautiful natural landscaping and fields.

And again, we looked at using exposed steel. You could almost say it looked

more like maybe a Myron project. But it wasn't. But I'm sure Myron was

talked to a couple of times. One of the big things we did on the corporate

office building is we used a lot of exposed steel that people got all concerned

about. Well, if there's a fire the office building was only five-stories high; but

if there was a fire, the steel was just exposed rather than being fire-protected

or encased in something. What would happen? So structurally, we did a lot

of initial work in fire engineering, which at that point in time, was in the

early seventies. This just wasn't being done. It was being done in academia,

so we worked with some of the U.K. groups that were just starting to do that.

We came up with ideas on how you could prove that by dimensionality or by

size of members that you can actually protect steel. It will not fall down or

collapse because there's a fire. So the office building that I still think is great,

is still there. The tobacco company still owns it, although I think it's being

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used for other things. It had a lot of structural exposed steel. It wasn't all

exposed, but the façades had balconies on them. And again, it was a great

project. Part of it was that it was overseas, it was something different and you

met different people at different engineering groups.

Blum: Was there any question about where it would be sited?

Korista: They had a thousand acres that was close to Bristol, but it was just almost like

it was out in the country, but it wasn't.

Blum: Bruce has said that one of the reasons he or you…

Korista: Or Faz.

Blum: …used design with the cable roof is because there was a bridge within view,

built by Isambard Brunel, and it was designed to be sympathetic to that

famous bridge?

Korista: I remember that.

Blum: Is that just some folklore after the fact?

Korista: Oh, I'm sure if you talk to Bruce it was Bruce's idea, but I'm sure somewhere

in there, yeah, there was a bridge. I can remember more of a functional use in

that they were looking for huge column-free spaces so all these lines of the

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manufacturing process, which is not uncommon for manufacturing, is they

don't want to be disturbed even by one little column here and one little

column there. They were just like they have in size. I forget what the span is,

but it was 300 or 400 feet and 900 feet the other way. That whole huge floor

was just open. So they could have their lines of production here and they

could turn them around the next day and build this way, and so we got the

long-span thing. Probably the cable roof and the cable bridge were in there

too, but I remember a functional part of it which was to get all those columns

out of there.

Blum: There was an English group of architects or engineers that worked on this

project too, and it has been written that they worked so differently from the

way SOM worked that one sort of tempered the other.

Korista: I worked mostly with the structural engineering group, which was a

gentleman that was a well-known U.K. engineer at the time, Frank Newby,

who had his own practice. He was one of the partners; I think it was

Samuelly and Associates. They were in London; they had offices other place

in the U.K. They were very knowledgeable, high-end structural engineers,

and we got on very well. Now, their codes were different, and the U.K. at

that point in time was very protective, they always did a very good job of

protecting themselves. Intrusions of overseas architects, whether they be

European or U.S., kept pretty minimized for a long period of time.

Blum: Well, why would a British job go to an American firm?

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Korista: Because I think it was a combination of things. They were interested, I think,

in the technology of cable roofs. We were about at the same point in time

doing Baxter Laboratories, the first phase here. And Myron had come up

with the cafeteria which had the cable-suspended roof. Both Bruce and

Myron were involved in that one. And I think, as I recall, one of the things

they were interested in was cable roofs, and that was one of the things that

people had done here. Now people knew about cables and bridges, but

cables for buildings hadn't been used that much. Today they're widely used,

but at that time they weren't. But I won't say on that particular one I knew all

the nuances of how we got the groups together, but it certainly was a British

connection and a U.S. connection. I don't know, maybe Bruce Graham

smoked Imperial Tobacco cigarettes!

Blum: Maybe. Another project that you worked on with Bruce was also based in

London, or near London, the Canary Wharf project.

Korista: To get to Canary Wharf from Wills Tobacco with Bruce, I'd like to kind of

step back just a little bit. About the same time it was starting, we were kind of

finishing up our effort on Wills Tobacco, and New World Center in Hong

Kong. And to me the steps are here, so I'd like to talk a little bit about New

World Center.

Blum: Do, please. Was the New World Center your first job in Asia?

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Korista: New World Center was in Hong Kong. That was certainly my first experience

in the Far East as far as trying to build buildings. Fazlur was started out on

the thing with Bruce and Faz said, Yeah, but I'm doing Sears Tower and I'm

not going to do something else. Okay, Stan you come. So Bruce said to me,

"Okay, you're going to do it." So that was about the way things were, "Okay,

you're going to do it." So we went over there and we had one meeting. The

interesting part to me was it was with a Chinese client who was a large client

and is still a large development client there, New World Development

Corporation. And they had their own contractor who was Chinese, the Hip

Hing Construction, which is still one of the biggest ones in southern China.

And the whole job was Chinese. In the early seventies, Hong Kong was run

by the British, or at least you and I would think that. It was a British colony

and all the rules and regulations were British. But when you got there you

found out, well, that was nice, but the Chinese, like usual, actually ran it.

They just let the British coexist. So it was very interesting to see that

dichotomy. Now engineeringwise we got into a lot of very special things; this

was an old harbor on the Kowloon side, so it's just west of the Hong Kong

island across the harbor, Victoria Harbor. They had bought up a series of old

godowns, and they were right on the water. They wanted to do this massive

development there, the program called for 6 million square feet, which was

astronomical and still is astronomical when you talk about that. Sears Tower

is 4 million square feet and it's tall, and the Pentagon is--whatever it is--6

million square feet.

Blum: Huge.

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Korista: And the Merchandise Mart is whatever it is. So 6 million square feet, and it

wasn't going to be very tall. But we got involved and it was really the first

modern attempt at a significant structure in Hong Kong. They had some

hotels that were built that were newer, but a massive multi-use structure that

was residential, it was hotel, it was retail, it was commercial. It was right

down on the water. We dug a very deep basement right next to the water, so

we were three-feet away from the Pacific Ocean, and it was a huge

excavation because they had lots of levels of parking below. It was the whole

process for really their first time, including engineering and architecture––

that the building had a lot of configuration that Bruce brought along. It was a

very predominant site, including a very exclusive hotel that's actually sitting

out over the water. It was the Regent [now InterContinental Hotel].

Blum: Were there several tallish buildings on a platform? A little like Lever House?

Korista: No, they weren't tall.

Blum: Well, tallish.

Korista: They're twenty-stories, but there is a platform at the base and there's a

promenade that's over the water. It was kind of a ribbon building. There was

feng-shui in that thing. The ribbon building partially was because the

dragons, the hills in Hong Kong, which is actually very hilly once you get

away from the harbor on the west side. The hills were called the sleeping

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dragons. So this somewhat serpentine figure along the edge of the existing

waterfront was good feng shui and we did it. It was a very interesting

project.

Blum: Was this the structure with the moat or was that another?

Korista: That might have been another one. I don't remember that we had a moat on

it. Was it spectacular architecture? Probably not. It was very spectacular in

that its site was spectacular. It mixed all these functions together, all of which

we knew how to do, but it became as much a technical exercise. How do you

build these buildings on and over the water, at that point in time? Today it's

easier. So that was a project for which I was back and forth to Hong Kong

probably fifteen times between 1973 and 1978. Bruce was probably back and

forth four or five times. We actually started an office there. We had some

people over there for five or six years, mainly on that project. I fell in love

with Hong Kong with that project, because I think Hong Kong is spectacular.

I think it still is. It's a beautiful place to be. They have smog and they have

dirt and those kind of things, but it's still very cosmopolitan. You do get the

sense of China and all the noise and all the people, which is its dense

population.

Blum: Was this one of the first projects in China for SOM?

Korista: It was in Hong Kong, yes, it was the first one in China.

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Blum: And you did the planning and the building.

Korista: We did everything. Everything from beginning to end.

Blum: How did a Chinese project come to SOM?

Korista: For this one actually, the client came looking for Bruce Graham.

Blum: Really!

Korista: To do a project for him. Really, in Hong Kong, other than a couple of hotels,

most of the buildings, at that point in time, were still the old ones that the

British had built whenever they built them in the twenties and thirties. They

weren't looking so much at tall buildings; they were just looking for

somebody that knew how to do 5 million or 6 million square feet, which is

what they thought they wanted to build. So for all the methodologies of

modern construction and concrete work and structural steelwork and

cladding and special windows and developing a very high-end hotel, they

came looking for Bruce Graham from his reputation.

Blum: Well, that must have pleased him.

Korista: It did. His architecture kind of fit the site precisely and it wasn't very ornate.

Today in China they're interested in things on top of the building, and they're

probably now into some of the modernistic things in Shanghai and Beijing

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where they're getting a little bit more extravagant. Traditionally they want

things on the inside; you can say part of their culture is inward. It's not so

exterior, it's interior. Nowadays in tall buildings, you'll still find them

spending more money inside the tall building than you will outside the tall

building.

Blum: How were you, personally, prepared to go into this very different culture and

manage?

Korista: I wasn't. That was just the fun of it. I hadn't been to China before, and I went

there, and basically after the first couple of meetings I was just there by

myself. And we started the structural engineering. The structural

construction work always starts first. So I got to meet the building

department first, and I got to get the permits first, and I got to meet the

contractors first, and it involved some overseas contractors. I was in the

middle of contract negotiation and meeting with the client. Now our client

was Chinese. Their main business was, in fact, diamonds and jewelry but

they were just starting this development arm, and certainly it was very

successful. So you do all these things, you have to let yourself be immersed in

it, try to understand their thought process, and then you bring your expertise

and ability. You can't do it the way you would do it in Chicago. You find

different ways to negotiate in Hong Kong, and negotiate in Chicago, or

Boston, or London.

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Blum: Do you read or speak a little Chinese? Just a little phrase that'll get you a cup

of coffee?

Korista: At times I have, but when you don't do it all the time, you forget it right

away.

Blum: What was it like negotiating with your counterpart in China?

Korista: Well, you've got to remember that in Hong Kong most all the Chinese,

because the British had been there, most all of them spoke English reasonably

well. So at that point in time, probably anybody under thirty spoke English

okay, or they'd gone to not only English schools.

Blum: And the people you were dealing with?

Korista: It was kind of a mix. People over thirty didn't speak English too well. So our

main client, he was probably, at the time, forty-five pushing fifty, very

wealthy, and he spoke not too much English to begin with. Now as he went

on he kind of forced himself to speak English. But he had a son and this was

his first startup in the development business. He had gone to, I don't know if

he had gone to Oxford or Yale, or something like that, so he spoke English

fairly well. But you get into discussions where people are talking in Chinese,

still today. I don't know generally what they're saying, but you find the old

Chinese proverb that a picture is worth ten thousand words, so it really is

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true. As long as you can draw things, and they understand where you are

and where you are going.

Blum: Is that how you got along sometimes by sketching?

Korista: Sure, very definitely. Sometimes you had people that would help interpret, or

you were talking in English but… you had to mix them all up. And that's true

all over. It is lucky that English is kind of a common denominator, and in a

lot of countries still today, are moving towards business being conducted in

English. That helps, but you still find many places that they don't speak

English. So they may understand you more or less, but they're not about to

do their pidgin English back to you, so they'll speak in Russian.

[Tape 3: Side A]

Blum: You were saying?

Korista: I was saying that even in China today, the vast majority of people understand

generally and read English pretty well, but they refrain from speaking

English just because. I probably know some words in Chinese, but when I say

it to them it's nowhere close to what it should be.

Blum: Is it your pronunciation?

Korista: Probably, I've never had a problem anywhere in the world. Whatever the

language is I can get by. As long as you attune yourself to a little bit of what

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their culture is, and don't assume that because you're from the West or you're

from the U.S. your way must be the best way, whether it's eating dinner or

having a drink or doing structural engineering or architecture. It works, so

I'm confident of that. And when we were doing the New World Center,

which took a period of years, we were looking actively for some other work.

Once that project got well underway––New World Development Company's

second venture as a development company––was to do a large area of

reclamation, Some of their estuaries from the ocean come into the new

territories, which is on the west side of Victoria Island. What was along one

of the estuaries? There was a small town then called Sha Tin, and it was kind

of at the end of one of the estuaries that was coming in from the Pacific. It

was somewhere between a river and a bay. As they had done many times

over there when they have all these mountains, and they need some backfill

material, they just carefully cut down a mountain.

Blum: Did they terrace it?

Korista: And they'd terrace a mountain. So we actually terraced a mountain and

placed these fill materials along the edge of this bay and built about, oh, it's

pretty close to 800 acres of new land, and then we did a master plan. So we

were involved with all the, civil engineering more than structural, which in

this case, included the landfill, new utilities and roadways. Then we did the

master plan for only high-rise residential. There were about forty-story high-

rises, but they were all very similar. They tended to build––you build one,

well, let's build forty of them right next to each other. So the master plan for

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the Sha Tin development for the same client as New World Center was about

forty or fifty high-rises that were about forty-stories high, all residential, all a

very similar mix in configuration. In reality, although we did the conceptual

design, designed two or three of them, that was one of the places where we

said, "Well, thank you, but no thank you," on architecture. Because to do forty

buildings that all looked the same…

Blum: Was this Bruce's job?

Korista: It was still Bruce's job, yeah. So this one turned out to be… Most of SOM's

involvement was in the civil engineering part; and I'm also a civil engineer,

so we spent a couple of years on that. We actually cut off the top of one

mountain and terraced it down––We built the roadways and took that fill

and in a sequenced manner, filled in a portion of the waterway and built

reclaimed land. So again, it was an interesting offshoot of buildings.

Blum: Did Bruce design the buildings? You say there were quite a few.

Korista: We did––you would call them prototypes. They actually built what we gave

them, but Bruce wasn't interested in doing forty of the same thing. He just

said, "No thank you."

Blum: Well, what was the general look or style of the buildings; were they clean,

spare, modern? Or did they incorporate some of Chinese motifs in it?

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Korista: No, I think it was typical Hong Kong residential.

Blum: What is that?

Korista: The residential going on at that time is still going on. It's blocks of buildings

that are very similar. Because the climate is relatively mild there, the newer

ones all had balconies because the people like to get outside of their houses.

The apartments, in our terms, were all very small, but these were on the elite

side of housing. We would consider it to be small, a 600 or 800 square-foot

thing. To them it would be like a penthouse, where we would consider 600 or

800 square-feet for an apartment to be small. They called them apartments

but they were really condominiums; they were selling them not renting them.

We would think that's minimalistic but that was one of their high-end things.

This group of residential towers was the first one that was being developed

out in this area. Now the Sha Tin area is 1.5 million people. At that time Sha

Tin was a small village town that had probably 20,000 people in it. This was

the late 1970s. So again, it was an interesting twist. Now actually toward the

end of that project, and New World Center was getting finished up––we got

into interiors, because the client had actually hired us to do quite a bit of the

interiors.

Blum: For which project?

Korista: New World Center. There was this big, large atrium with very ornate stairs

coming into the atrium that we had built. Bruce and the client got into a

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discussion, because the client wanted to have his input into what colors they

used. And of course, in China red and gold are very high-end things.

Blum: Are they symbolic colors in China?

Korista: They're symbolic, and it means good.

Blum: Does gold mean wealthy or rich?

Korista: Gold is gold and rich and things like that, and for whatever reason Bruce

decided he just didn't want the same things. So they went at each other for a

couple of days and then Bruce said, "No." And then the client said, "Well,

thank you, Bruce." And Bruce said, "Well, thank you." And we actually

departed. We left our office and departed based upon that discussion. So

things can happen that simply. From a business standpoint, it was very

inopportune, because this China development company is now, and has

been, one of the largest Chinese private developers since then till now. But

things can happen. We talk about working with individuals and individuals

tend to disagree. Some architects might say, "Oh, okay, you do what you

want. Okay, let's go to the next one." Bruce said, "No, that's not the way I

want the inside." That was one of the times that he really stuck to his guns,

because he knew that he wasn't going to settle up with them, but still it was a

major project. If we walked away from that, then the client was letting us go.

He got from us what he wanted, a world-class large-scale project. We got

from him a good job and made money. It was good architecture. To some of

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us sitting at a distance saying, well, how can we get as excited as that about

whether the color is red or gold or another color. In this case, it was I agree, a

central atrium area, but whether the main color was red or gold––I can't even

remember what the other color was––but that's the way it was. So it was a

great project; I loved it because it was in Hong Kong. Compared to a lot of

places you go, it just seemed to work. It wasn't easy, but at the same time we

had some projects in Indonesia and Singapore, so I could travel from there to

other places. I just kept going back and forth. I didn't live in Hong Kong for

more than two months at a time.

Blum: What about your family? Did they go with you?

Korista: They were there wondering where I was at! There were some families that

actually moved over there and stayed for two or three years, but no, my

family never wound up there.

Blum: But you were the itinerant.

Korista: I was the itinerant.

Blum: Well, travel seems to have played a very big role in your career.

Korista: Yeah, the last four or five years I've kind of tapered off, but that means thirty-

seven, thirty-eight years with a lot of travel. And I found the travel itself was

not particularly interesting. But when you do travel, you meet interesting

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people on planes that have nothing to do with engineering and architecture.

The New World client, even back in the seventies, was a wonderful client.

For the people that happened to be in Hong Kong, they'd have parties, they'd

have weddings, they would just invite the SOM people to go even if you had

nothing to do with what was there. The client would have several large

yachts, and he would just invite SOM people to go along, and they with a

whole bunch of Chinese high-rollers. So it was a very interesting project.

Blum: A minute ago we mentioned Canary Wharf. This was another project you

had with Bruce, and you wanted to show the natural evolution that led to

this job.

Korista: So we talked a little bit about New World Center, which again, was a very,

very large project that we were involved with in the master planning and

then we carried it all the way through fruition. In the early or mid-eighties,

people became interested in development of some of the eastern London

areas which were called the Docklands, The Canary Wharf in particular was

on the Isle of Dogs. These were old wharfs that had been in use up through

World War II and they were heavily bombed in the war. Basically, from the

war till 1985 nothing had been done there, so they were just things that went

back to the 1500s, but they weren't actively being used. There was obviously

waterway slips, and they were all on the Thames. It was a fertile area for

development. So through a series of different developers that came to Bruce,

he was to come up with a master plan and then instigate it. Now because in

these areas you had no infrastructure, i.e. they had no roadways, no utilities–

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–let alone buildings––we started from scratch. It was a London government

group, LDC, which is London Development Corporation, that was a group

overviewing the development. So it couldn't just be too random. The whole

eastern zones of the city of London, the boroughs, were basically ripe for

development. They were along the Thames; the main financial district had

always been in the heart of the city of London, and they were looking at

developing it more toward the east. So we went out there and the first time I

got there was sometime in 1985. I think it was in March or April, and

although it doesn't snow much in London, it snowed. But back in 1985, we

went out there, and I was with one of our planners and Bruce. We went out

to meet the LDC, which were located in a little bitty building on one corner of

what became Canary Wharf development. And you were out in a derelict

area; there were old cranes from World War II. Some of them had been

bombed. They were just leaning over, and that was, what, forty years ago?

They just stayed that way for forty years. It was snowing, and it was nice and

cold. That was my baptism to the site. We developed a master plan, of which

there was a lot of civil engineering, let alone structural engineering, because

we had to build a roadway system and we had to build a utility system.

Blum: Was SOM the only group working on the project?

Korista: SOM was the only group. We started with one developer, Ware Travelstead,

who was a U.S. developer, and not with a very big organization. But at least

he had some good thoughts. So he steered us through the basics… what they

call in London, the master plan. Probably in the U.S. we would call it

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schematic design. We got it approved by the LDC, and then basically he

decided he would just sell this project that he now had approval to build; it

was 14 million square-feet of buildings and all the infrastructure for the

portion of the Docklands. He just sold that to Olympia and York, which was

a Canadian development group. Olympia and York basically developed the

first three or four phases, and they're still building today. Olympia and York

had financial troubles in the early nineties, like lots of development people,

and so it's changed ownership. However, many of the development people

that are managing the projects today are still the same people that we worked

with in the initial phases.

Blum: SOM, you said, was the first architectural firm.

Korista: First architectural and engineering firm.

Blum: But then did other groups come in?

Korista: We did the master plan, so the master plan had to be approved by LDC,

which was the government authority. Once that was done, then the first

developer, Ware Travelstead just took that right and sold it, for a lot of

money, to Olympia and York, who then actually financed building the actual

infrastructure and buildings.

Blum: And did they stick with SOM as their architecture firm?

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Korista: And they stuck with SOM as their master plan architect and engineer. Now

for their buildings, they decided that they would like to have other architects,

and so for the first two or three phases, there were other architects that did

some of the buildings, besides SOM. But they did follow all of SOM's design,

and we were on site for the construction of the infrastructure. In starting the

infrastructure, there was nothing, only a street to get out there, but there was

no street that went out on the wharves. We actually took the wharves, which

were these mile-long slots of what you think of as a wharf, but it was actually

man-made. On each side was a waterway, because that's where the old

sailing ships would come in and they'd unload their cargoes onto the wharf.

Then the ships would get turned around in there and go back out through

the locks, back into the Thames, and back out into the sea. So those were

things in there.

Blum: Was this developed as a commercial center or a residential center?

Korista: The idea was, in the master plan, for basically a commercial center. The idea,

the concept was to provide a new financial center in London, which was

probably a mile and a half from the main financial center that had been there

since, probably, 1600.

Blum: What did Bruce have to do with the planning?

Korista: He was very active in the master plan as far as buildings, because we set up

architectural guidelines and technical guidelines. Besides, we had to do

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basically a schematic design of all the engineering just to get this LDC

approval. At the same time, London started to boom. So as we started Canary

Wharf, there was another London developer that decided to build over the

Liverpool Street Station… They got into the idea of air rights. Well, we had

done air rights projects here in Chicago near by the river, over Union Station

and North Western Railroad Station starting in the sixties and seventies. A

whole series of buildings were built. So based on that, these London people

were interested in building buildings over train tracks. Now that's become

very popular, and almost every train station that exists in London now has

buildings built in the air rights above them. This is true of a lot of urban cities

around the world where trains come into the center of the city, turn around

and go back out. Not commuter trains, but freight trains. The train companies

had very valuable property, very close to the center of cities, which is where

they had their depots. Of course, trains operate at ground level, or just below

ground level, and you have all this air up above. When you build around

that, pretty soon people say, Well, why don't we just build over that? In

London this initial air rights project was called the Broadgate development.

Bruce also got very involved in that.

Blum: Were you with him on that?

Korista: I started out on that, but then that developer said, "Wait a minute now. Bruce,

we want to have you and a whole team of architects and engineers doing our

project." And by that time Olympia and York had come in on the other one

[Canary Wharf] and said, "Bruce, we want you or someone else on our

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project but not on all the projects." So the teams did start to separate,

although Bruce was actively involved in both, he was probably more

involved as we went downstream in the late eighties in the Broadgate project,

with the Exchange House.

Korista: It is the arched one. Hal [Iyengar] was very much involved with Broadgate; I

was the one that was involved in Canary Wharf.

Blum: How did the two projects differ?

Korista: Broadgate was mostly just buildings, buildings over tracks, where Canary

Wharf we had to do all the civil engineering before anybody could start

building buildings. They were a little bit different process. At Canary Wharf,

in the first phase, we did actually two of the buildings, and there were two or

three other architects that did maybe another three or four.

Blum: What did the buildings look like? Were they sympathetic to the…?

Korista: They had, in the first two phases what LDC had agreed to was sympathetic

to London, which was basically, in general terms, there was a height limit of

about fourteen stories.

Blum: And was it a more traditional look than, say, glass and steel?

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Korista: It was a new but traditional look. Olympia and York decided that they were

going to create––there was a good deal going on––so they were going to

create their headquarters out there. So they separated and got the LDC to

agree to their own fifty-story tower. Bruce and I were involved with the

conceptual design of that tower but then they decided to politically go

another way.

Blum: Oh, do you mean use someone else's design?

Korista: No, they kind of used our design, but Cesar Pelli actually did it for them. I'm

not saying that Cesar copied it, but Olympia and York decided that what

they wanted was one tall building, which is One Canada Square, and then all

the rest of the initial phase buildings were in the nine- to twelve-stories

range. Now in further phases that occurred––we had the recession of 1992 to

2000––so about 2000, they started building again out there. SOM was not

involved in all of them. They went back up to forty-story buildings and got

them approved. They built probably half a dozen forty-story buildings. Then

they expanded to the next wharf to the south, and they built maybe four or

five twenty-story buildings. Now SOM, Adrian Smith, was involved in a

couple of the buildings on this adjacent wharf. So they kind of continued

down the path of having not one architect for everything.

Blum: What was their thinking behind that? Were they trying to be another

Columbus, Indiana?

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Korista: Yeah, they were looking for another Columbus, Indiana. They liked to have

different people's things for different places. They finally got into doing some

residential buildings, and they had different architects for those. Of course

there were British architects that were clamoring and saying, "Well, why not

us instead of…?" because the initial two or three phases were international

architects. So there were some British architects that came in, and they've

continued on building but now I'm not sure it will continue with this recent

slowdown. Canary Wharf as a financial center has been very successful;

they've rented out all the places, so even though there was a big dip at the

beginning in the early nineties, it's pulled itself out and it is recognized as the

new financial center of London. Now Broadgate was also financial, but it's

much closer to the original financial district, and it's built completely over the

train tracks. Both the New World Center and Canary Wharf were very large-

scale, long-term, high-square-footage areas; they weren't necessarily super

tall buildings, but they allowed the civil and structural engineer a lot of

participation in the work besides the architecture.

Blum: So you were in on the ground floor?

Korista: Yes, on the ground floor for Canary Wharf. The first meeting was in the

snow. Of course the first thing we want to know is… it's nice talking about all

these buildings, but you have no utilities, you have no roadways. I was

wearing my civil engineering hat versus only a structural engineering hat.

Blum: Were your skills needed in the subsequent phases?

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Korista: Oh sure, because you needed a structural engineer. They had things that the

old wharf had––retaining walls that were built in the early 1600s, and they

were built out of masonry. They actually have historic ratings over there, and

certain things in London you can't move; you can cover them up but you

can't move them. So they had a thing that these retaining walls along the

waterways––they were called banana walls because they are actually shaped

like a banana––they were actually curved. Engineeringwise, there's a reason

for that. But those were historically listed Class 1. So we couldn't move those:

we could dig behind them, we could move the water in front of them, but we

had to leave them there. As you went along the wharf, which was about a

mile long, there were certain places where people had to be able to see them.

So when we did the infrastructure/roadways, we'd actually make

promenades where people could look back in at this old masonry wall that

was done in 1600.

Blum: What was the reason for the shape you describe?

Korista: Well, actually, when you put earth behind it, in earth failure there's actually a

zone called the shear slip zone. You can look at it as either this way or

resisting forces this way, so they curved these walls slightly. Now some of

them had wooden piles down at the bottom that would prop the ends of the

walls. These walls were built before reinforced concrete. These walls were

just gravity stones, so the shape helped them resist the earth between the

walls. The earth behind the walls is where your horse carts, and so forth,

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went up and down the wharf, and your ships were sitting outside these walls

on water. They call them banana walls, or we call them banana walls.

Blum: Do people still refer to them that way?

Korista: Yeah, I think you call them banana walls because they look like a banana.

They're historically listed. So a lot of them were just buried but we couldn't

take them out. It would have been easier just to take them out and put

something new back in there. So we always had to work behind the walls, or

in front of the walls.

Blum: With so much work, did SOM open an office in London?

Korista: Yeah, we had both of these large projects going on at the same time, because

that was kind of a boom in London. We happened to be involved with two of

the high-end projects. We changed a lot of the systems for commercial

office/commercial space. Structural steel was not heavily used in London,

and certainly we changed that by 100 percent. So we brought a lot of U.S.

commercial building technology to both of those projects. We had an office

open there; it was a full architectural, structural engineering, MEP

engineering, civil engineering, interiors and planning. I think at the height of

it we probably had 150 people in the office.

Blum: Who ran that office?

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Korista: Well, there were several people. Gordon Wildermuth started it at the

beginning; then it was switched over to Jim DeStefano. Somewhere in there

Jim DeStefano decided to leave SOM, so we had Carolina Woo and Tom

Fridstein as partners over there that were project partners. Bruce basically

stayed involved with both of them. When we got into the buildings on

Canary Wharf, Adrian Smith became involved with one of the buildings. The

other building was for Morgan Stanley, and Bruce actually stayed involved in

the design of that. He mainly concentrated on all the design of Broadgate,

which was the other large development. So he stayed active all the way

through. There wasn't another design partner other than Adrian coming in

on the tail end of things.

Blum: Was that when Bruce left?

Korista: Both were large projects when Bruce was about ready to retire. Our initial

involvement at Canary Wharf went up through about 1992, and that's when

the heavy economic, especially real estate recession kind of took over. Bruce

actually retired, I guess, in 1989 or something like that.

Blum: Yes, in 1989.

Korista: And he was around for the piece of time after that. So Adrian was picking up

some of his work. I had previously worked with Olympia and York on

Olympia Center here in Chicago, and Adrian had worked on that. Olympia

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and York people knew him so they wanted him to do one of the buildings.

Bruce did another building, and then we did all this infrastructure work.

Blum: So your skill was needed in both the infrastructure and the structural work?

Korista: It was a huge project, you talk about building fifteen million square-feet of

space within five or six years! That's enormous.

Blum: Where did the canary in Canary Wharf come from? I think of a little yellow

bird.

Korista: Canary Wharf is actually the name of the wharf that we were building on.

These wharves are just fingers of islands, there's West India Wharf, which

was one next to us. Canary Wharf is on the Isle of Dogs, so I guess I never

learned the word canary. My guess is it came from trade with the Canary

Islands. The Canary Islands were an important trading partner.

Blum: That seems reasonable.

Korista: I forget who is the government in the Canary Islands now, but all I do know

is that there was a lot of trade, and still is, with the Canary Islands. These

wharves basically had names, like if you go back into the 1600s and 1700s

with the trading partners that were out there, well they kind of named these

wharves. These were the main wharves for ocean ships that came up the

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Thames and then unloaded in these wharves and turned back around and

went back out.

Blum: Did you learn a lot of English history working there?

Korista: It was kind of fun, yeah. A certain part of English history, especially about

the shipping stuff. Now the other part that wasn't so much fun is that these

areas were heavily bombed during World War II, so in the process of doing

the infrastructure and turning up a lot of ground, we wound up uncovering,

I think about six or eight World War II bombs. They were all German bombs,

and one of them was a pretty good size bomb, like a 500-pound bomb. They

still have bomb removal people in the government over there. The big one

they actually…

Blum: So did they dismantle them?

Korista: They closed the site. The smaller ones they dismantled; the bigger one they

decided to move. They were worried about trying to take it apart and have it

blow up. They actually moved it onto a barge down the river, and of course

the site was clear.

Blum: And they blew it up? Or dumped it in the water?

Korista: No, they blew it up. It actually blew up. At New World Center in Hong

Kong, when we were digging the slurry wall, in the trench around the

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outside which you dig down in the ground, we came up with and they took

about 250 Japanese bombs out of these trench excavations, but most of the

bombs were smaller. They were like 50-pound bombs; they were about this

size. The excavation equipment hit them but they didn't explode. Generally

the government didn't try to defuse them. They just picked them up; they put

them on a barge, they took them out in the ocean a mile, and then they put a

charge underneath them and blew it up. Now I've seen them do it a couple

times. If the charge went off by itself, it would just kind of go pfft. It would

break up the casings and they just sink in the sea. But most of them didn't do

that. When they set off the small charge, they really blew up. Because the gun

powder and stuff inside of there was still good after thirty-eight to forty

years. So those are really interesting tidbits that happen on projects.

Blum: Well, yes. Those are unique stories. There was another wharf that you

worked on with Adrian, Rowes Wharf in Boston. Shall we tackle that now?

Korista: Sure. I worked with Adrian from the time he joined SOM, which was not too

far after I began work at SOM. He actually worked on Wills Tobacco; he went

over to England for a couple of years as a young architect in the early

seventies. Then on a lot of his projects, we worked together. So I got familiar

with what he was doing and how to kind of meld his design with the

structure. He became more used to technology, and in this case, I had a

chance to see somebody go from just a young architect, young in age and

young in architecture, to a seasoned well-qualified architect and with his own

"star-architect" name today.

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Blum: Was he one of the young architects who sat at your knee, figuratively

speaking?

Korista: I don't know that he sat at my knee, but we sat together.

Blum: Okay, and you worked with him on this project.

Korista: At times I've worked with him pretty exclusively. Rowes Wharf was a

fantastic project. It came about by a circuitous route of a developer that was

basically Beacon Companies, which primarily was involved in doing smaller-

scale hotels. The Chicago office, for whatever reason, had already worked on

probably half a dozen projects in Boston over the years, which didn't have

anything to do with Adrian or this developer. They got the property rights

down on the harbor, and again, it was an area like most people would look

around and say, "Well, if I can buy the land cheap," because it was an old

wharf area that's not used. "It's on the water," that's good, because they were

building residential and commercial and condominiums. So here was this

chance for them to get down there and build it. It was an old area and there

were pieces of the wharf that we pulled out of there that went way back into

the 1600s, pre-Revolutionary War. People did come out and get historical

facts. Their concept was a linear project that was hemmed in by the

expressway on one side, literally, and water on the other side. So Adrian

came up with a very interesting mix of buildings and then bringing the

historical sense or classical sense which is kind of where he is. He has,

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especially on the exterior, a kind of a classical approach to his façade systems,

and so forth. Stone and some articulation, or as much articulation as money

will buy, and ornamentation with a historical or classical reference. I think

that's one of the reasons that he's done several projects in Boston now, and

that's one of the reasons they were interested, because most projects in

Boston, if you want to get something done, they wanted something that had

some historical connection. It didn't have to be the same stone, the same

façades, but they had to have some historical connection. This project had a

lot of interesting engineering challenges, because again, we were right up

against the water. So the first thing is you're going to build five basements

down in the ground. Well, how do you do that?

Blum: How was it that this group, or this project, had to have the approval of the

historic preservation group in Boston?

Korista: They have a group out there called B.R.A., Boston Redevelopment Alliance.

They're like the planning group in Chicago. They're both pseudo-government

and they have the final say on what goes where. They're probably even

harder than the planning commission in Chicago. What they say, pretty

much goes. And you've got to finally get past them for whatever you're

doing. They're not looking for all the same thing, but they take a very, very

strong look. Nowadays they're very heavily into sustainability and

environmental, so they try to look at where they are in Boston, and they

control things quite a bit. Right behind this development there was a series of

buildings that were going up. They were probably thirty- or forty-story

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residential condominiums. Then you had this spur of expressway, but right

along the waterfront there was no way they wanted to have a bank of thirty-

or forty-story buildings inside of it. So they settled on, I think, twenty-two

stories, or something like that, maximum. But they really wanted things that

were lower than that. They wanted to have a passageway through the

project, because there was an old road that actually came down to the wharf

at that point, so as part of the Rowes Wharf project we actually have this

rotunda.

Blum: The one at the water's edge?

Korista: At the water's edge, and it actually passes through the building. As an entry

you can go to the hotel and offices one way, and then the condominiums and

offices the other way. But the purpose of it was not just architecture; they

were asking, what was an old roadway actually passing through for? Now it

has a modern function that was actually fire department access to the pier

side because otherwise we were cut off; you couldn't get the fire trucks in.

Usually the fire department wants to be on both sides of the building and not

just one side of the building. You have all this wharf area, and we actually

built some condominiums out over the water. We have two platform

structures which are on piles down in the water that were built, and they're

only five- or six-stories. They were interesting condominiums because we

had a floating slip, so you could have your own sailboats because it was right

on Boston Harbor. At the other side there was a requirement that a cross-

harbor ferry could dock there, which does that and it's very interesting. If

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you're at the airport, you can take a quick bus over to cross-harbor ferry and

it goes to Rowes Wharf. It's really a nice view across the harbor, especially if

it's in the morning when the sun is coming up. The main face of the wharf is

just about due east, and there's nothing but harbor all the way out to the sea.

Blum: I understand that this was a job that came to SOM by way of a competition.

Korista: It was a type of competition. They were almost developer competitions, so

B.R.A. was saying, we want to develop this; we're willing to sell this. Because

I think somehow it was owned by some city entity, and the developer teamed

up with architects and came up with competitive things. What Adrian did

was extraordinary. It was a good use of colors; it was a good use of blending

it into Boston. He used combinations of brick. Technologywise, we actually

mounted brick on precast panels, but it was brick and concrete, and the

concrete was toned back towards limestone, because they do have limestone

up there. He used a lot of granite because there is a lot of granite that comes

out of Vermont that's used in Boston, so granite was accented. He also had a

lot of high-quality metal finish pieces, especially at the pedestrian level. And

then with these wharves going out over the water with their own floating

slips, it's quite dramatic. Then you have this rotunda going through the

building. Then out in front of that there's a small, you could say outdoor

arena, where they actually have small musical events during the year. It's

right on the water. B.R.A. said part of it had to be public, so the public could

pass through that, it wasn't just the hotel guests or the people who work in

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the office, because there were all three: it was a hotel, there was office space,

and there was high-end condominiums.

Blum: It has been said that Adrian, to understand the terrain and the location and

all, did a photographic study of the area. What do you know about that?

Korista: Yeah, he loved to go and visit sites and then photograph them. Then he'd line

the photos up this way and line them up that way and think about it. A lot of

people would just go and say they want to visit the site, and they look

around and they get something in their mind, and that's good. But he did use

photography as a means of stimulating himself or keeping track of what the

clues are, or restraints that you can't go past. It might be the edge restraint, or

it might be the old building next door, or what's in the background, rather

than just… I kind of remember that; he did use that quite often.

Blum: Did he sketch? Go out on sketching trips?

Korista: Oh yeah, he did a lot of the sketching. He was one of the last of the architects

that do a lot of hand sketching, because the computer has gotten its way now

and people take laptops and let the computer speak for them.

Blum: Was the computer used heavily in this project?

Korista: Engineeringwise we used a computer for numerical computations. For

graphics, we were just getting there, but we did use the computer for graphic

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representation. Realistically, it was probably the mid-nineties before the

computers got to the point where design architects could reasonably use

them easily for initial conceptual concepts, and so forth. Adrian still sketches;

he sketches forever.

Blum: I read something about the up-down construction method. Would you

explain that please?

Korista: This followed the project we did here in Chicago, for Olympia and York,

which is the Olympia Center. It was the first time it had been done in the U.S.

It's basically where you build upward and downward simultaneously

because of constraints of depth of basement. It might be time, it might be

adjacent conditions, it might be water conditions. Both Olympia Center here

in Chicago and, especially, Rowes Wharf had all of those constraints. For

Rowes Wharf you wanted to go down in the ground deep; it was right next

to the ocean. There were buildings and/or roadways on the sides of it. So

rather than just take a lot of time to slowly dig down in the ground from the

top down and having to have a retention system for the excavation, and

somehow bracing it so it doesn't collapse inward, and then digging around

all that and going down, which is kind of the more conventional way, we

actually created what's called a concrete slurry wall around the site

perimeter. You dig it from the grade and you pour concrete from the top, so

you don't excavate down in the ground. So it goes down in the ground and

creates like four sides of a bathtub; there's not bottom in it. Then you put a

cap on this, which is usually at the ground level. Then when you're doing

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that you also put in the vertical column supports down in the ground from

grade. Then you start building the building up, and also they start digging

out the lower levels. So you dig out one level and then you pour the level,

usually it's concrete, then you dig underneath that another level and you

pour the concrete.

Blum: At the same time the building is rising?

Korista: As the building is going up, yeah. The advantage of that, although this

digging out here is complicated and more expensive, is that if you do it the

conventional way, you start here, you put these walls in, you have to

temporarily support the walls; then you've got to dig at the excavation hole,

you get all the way down to the bottom and you start going back up building

all the basement walls. Well, that's some period of time if this system works,

and it doesn't work very generally. But if you start building up the same time

as you're going down, then you're getting the above grade point, which is the

most important part because that's where you make your money. There is

usually parking down in the ground and mechanical space. So it worked

very well out there and it's called "up-down" construction.

Blum: Is that a system that SOM discovered or devised?

Korista: At Olympia Center, I guess I talked the contractor into believing that you

could do it and it's worthwhile. It's usually the general contractor that's

nervous, "Oh, geez, I don't want to go down and dig out that dirt from

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underneath." It costs more money, but you balance that against the time

effect that you can actually build up as well as you're building down. Now,

you have to have a deep basement. You have to have severe soil conditions,

underground water conditions, that makes it worthwhile going up as you're

going down.

Blum: Why isn't every building constructed that way? It seems fast.

Korista: Because time constraints or the cost constraints just may not warrant it.

Sometimes you get into union constraints; that certain unions won't work

when other unions are working. So you get all kinds of combinations of

things. And a lot of sites don't have very many basements. So if you don't

have deep basements––not every building has five basements. Most

buildings have one or two basements. So there are reasons not to have to do

that. We just spent all morning this morning talking about a potential new

project in Mexico City. Now Mexico City has very severe ground conditions,

besides earthquakes.

Blum: What do you mean, severe?

Korista: It's mushy. It's soft clays that are underlain by sand, so they've had a lot of

problems with buildings. They're basically on piles, which are long structural

elements that go way down in the ground. Some of these soils, when you

shake it like that, will actually turn to almost liquid, they liquefy. That causes

problems. So foundations are very critical down there. Well, because Mexico,

139 like many places, says if you're going to build a commercial office building, you have to have so many levels of parking. Well, most architects would like not to have parking above grade, even though we do buildings with it above grade; they'd rather go down. So currently, SOM has a proposal in a competition in Mexico City, to go down ten levels of parking into the ground.

Well, it was a similar problem as this we got into, "Well, we're going to have to have this slurry wall around the perimeter. How do we do the foundations? Why not, so we don't wait to go all the way down to come all the way back up before we go up here. Why not do this up-down and try to go down, however much trouble this is, while going up with the office building at the same time?" So part of our competition, whether we win or not, was getting into constructability issues. Some clients have a business arm, or a contracting arm that yes, they are concerned about what is the building that Adrian Smith is giving me, or whoever the architect is, and what it looks like, because that's important. But some of them are savvy enough to know, Well, I'll never be able to build that. They're telling me I can go down infinitely in the ground, and it doesn't matter. Just like the spire here in Chicago, Calatrava's building. Everybody's focus is on what is up there, but to do that he's got a very, very deep hole, which they actually built and now they have stopped work. That structure that went down into the ground, although it's not exciting to an architect or to you, to an engineer there were a lot of special systems that were done there to go down that deep, and currently there's a kind of a structural circular hole out there. Well, this was similar to Mexico. They're given conditions where what's going on below grade will make or break the project, because if he can't get this

140

achieved either in time or money, if you spent so much money going down

and coming up, in time or money, you can actually cause a project to just

fold. In other words people just spent too much extra time and money down

below before you ever get to build the building.

[Tape 3: Side B]

Blum: Oh, you were talking about the up-down construction method, and how it

was feasible and how it wasn't feasible in some designs.

Korista: The up-down construction is really a function of the building, the location,

the number of levels below grade, and the complications. So it doesn't fit

every project, but it can be very beneficial.

Blum: Well, was this method used at Rowes Wharf?

Korista: This was used at Rowes Wharf as a way that they could go both up and

down at the same time. We had used it, as we talked about previously, at

Olympia Center. And we've used variations of it several other places.

Blum: You worked on Canary Wharf; you worked on Rowes Wharf. Which was the

greater challenge engineeringwise?

Korista: I think from a structural engineering standpoint, Rowes Wharf was probably

a greater challenge because there were more building elements. At Canary

Wharf, you had to develop the whole infrastructure before we could start

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doing buildings. We did the roadway systems, some were below grade or

below the water, and all the utilities had to be brought in. This required more

of the civil engineering side of what are known as civil engineers. So, even

though we did a couple buildings after that, probably the complexity was

different on the two. And that's what's always been interesting, that there are

variations on whether you're a civil engineer, in the sense of utilities and

roadways, or, as in most of my career, I'm a civil engineer primarily doing

the structural engineering part of civil engineering.

Blum: Rowes Wharf was completed, and the critics took a look at it, and one critic

from Inland Architect said, "It blends so well with the city, it almost blends too

well; it becomes absorbed like camouflage."

Korista: Well, I think certainly Rowes Wharf, at the time, had one side on the bay or

the ocean, and on the opposite side was an expressway spur/ramp on the

water side. And then behind that, they had just started building a series of

taller residential buildings that were also required to blend into the Boston

motif of colors at least, so there was a lot of reddish brown brick and precast

in stone that was used. So when Rowes Wharf was finished, if you look at it

from the harbor, like you were coming across the harbor ferry from the

airport to Rowes Wharf, then you look at this and you see this, almost like

the side of a mountain that's very high up. Very honestly, when you look at a

picture, you have to look at it twice to really see that Rowes Wharf is down

there defining the water's edge, which is what it's intended to do. Because the

ground elevation also goes up behind Rowes Wharf, all these buildings, even

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though they weren't more than probably forty-story buildings, they tend to

be much, much higher in total elevations. So as you look across you almost

say, "Well, where is Rowes Wharf?"

Blum: Were other architects involved in the development of this area?

Korista: The area beyond was completely other projects, other developers. It just

turned out that in their buildings they were subjected to what the Boston

Redevelopment Authority, B.R.A., wanted to do. They liked to keep the

context similar, especially in color. So you do find a lot of similar colors. As

you look, the most spectacular picture from Rowes Wharf is really from the

water and is about the only one you really get, because on the far side you

run into this roadway ramp, which is the entry side. The other two ends are

just the short ends of the building. So it's really a linear building oriented in

the northeast/southwest direction. So the spectacular view is from the harbor

side, and that's where the best pictures are. But as those pictures come, you

see it's down here and you almost lose it, because Rowes Wharf covers up the

interstate highway ramp. So it goes from the top of Rowes Wharf into the

bottom of these buildings beyond, and you could begin to lose it. So I could

see some critic saying, "Well, it blends too well."

Blum: Do you think it did its job to bring new life into the area?

Korista: The purpose of it was to be a redevelopment of harbor side areas, and it does

that, I think, very well. I think most critics have said it's a spectacular project

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for a multifunctional project. They have condominiums over water and they

have condominiums on land; they have a high-end hotel; they also have

offices; they have their own marina; and they have this cross-harbor ferry

that all come together.

Blum: Was it difficult with these various uses to separate them?

Korista: The coordination was difficult, because on the landside, all three of those

things are totally integrated within the same building. And then the harbor

side started out to be––they're only four- and five-story buildings that are

actually built on top of a platform directly over the water, so there's water

underneath them. As small low-rise office and condominium, there's actually

two of these piers joining over the water. It turned out they just found a

market, so they're all condominium. And as I say, you can park your own

boat right next to your front door down on the plaza level.

Blum: Was a computer used much with this project?

Korista: The design was in the early to mid-eighties, so that was about the point

where the computer graphics, which is what people mean when they talk

about using the computer, was just coming online as far as being a useful

tool. It's the time when SOM was working with IBM to develop our own

system that was called AES.

Blum: Tell us more about that.

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Korista: AES, Architectural Engineering Systems, which was a complete graphic

system that would interface with technical architecture and all the different

engineering disciplines. And that went on from about 1983 to about 1990, the

point being that IBM was going to market this even though most of their

business was in the business field. However, in the early nineties, when there

was an economic downturn, especially in the real estate market, IBM decided

that they weren't particularly interested in architectural engineering systems,

so it stopped. So we were about two-thirds of the way in the project, and we

did have a very viable graphic system which architects and engineers could

use to make their final drawings. So the start of the computer graphics being

used was about the time of Rowes Wharf.

Blum: Rowes Wharf. What about the Canary Wharf? Was the computer used there?

Korista: Computer to me, as an engineer, a computer was always used because it's

always used on the engineering side. On the graphics side it was probably a

little bit less because that was a larger job that was spread out longer

distances. We actually had more than one client for some of the buildings.

We did a building for Morgan Stanley, and Morgan Stanley was an

independent client, Whereas most of the other buildings that were done in

Canary Wharf then were really developed by the Canadian group. So some

of the computer graphics were being done. When you deal with the middle

to late eighties, we were just starting to get––all architects and engineers were

getting started to the point where you had viable graphic systems. When

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today people talk about Auto CAD and Micro Station, it's like, "Didn't we

always do that?" Well, for those that have been around before 1990, which is,

agreed, eighteen years ago now, it wasn't so usual and there weren't a lot of

options at that time. There wasn't anything like Auto CAD. They were also

developing things. So we were using our own systems, and basically from

1985 to about 1995 we used our own systems, even though the work with

IBM stopped in about 1991. Then after 1995 with the advent of the PCs, it

changed from mainframe ideology, as far as architects and engineers go, to

PC-based. Then Auto CAD and Micro Station and some others came out with

smaller programs that were still powerful programs, so we were kind of

driven toward a change, even though SOM had our own graphics programs.

We made short work of that. There was a lot of transition in the use of

computers from, let's say 1985 to 2000. From 2000 until now, most people

throughout the world are using the Auto CAD or Micro Station graphic

systems; however, we've gone beyond two-dimensional systems, which is

what drawings are when you draw your own picture. You might have put a

three-dimensional perspective to it, but it was really a two dimensional

display, to now when what everyone would like to have is totally three-

dimensional, and so you can automatically, with the computer, keep track of

three-dimensional data and not just two-dimensional data.

Blum: Do you think the computer is a help?

Korista: The computer needs to be considered as a tool. My concern is that if you

consider it as a tool, and not the brain for the project, architecturally or

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structural engineeringwise, your human brain, then you're all right. But the

dosage rate that students are getting from literally pre-grade school, as they

go up through college, we find that very honestly, people that come out of

college, not only in graphics, but in the numerical part, in the engineering, it's

almost as if their understanding is that the answer lies with the computer,

that there's something in the computer that will make decisions and

something in the computer that will automatically do things. Now that's a

conceptual statement. It's a very powerful tool, it's very valuable in

engineering to be able to look at a lot of alternatives. In structural

engineering, besides the design, we're interested in how things behave, how

far they move or how much they turn around or twist. So it's a very powerful

tool to look at more and more combinations of material behavior. As we get

more and more involved with better environmental engineering, the

mechanical/electrical engineers use a lot of numerical number crunching,

which the computer is very good at. As far as studying more thoroughly the

flow of air into and out of a building; the amount of power in and out of the

building, trying to use solar radiation or prevent solar radiation or use wind

for creating electricity or affordable takes, all of which, when you're doing it,

besides maybe there's an architectural aspect of it, is there's a lot of number

crunching. But computers are great at number crunching and looking at

alternatives.

Blum: You seem to be very comfortable with the computer. But is it being abused?

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Korista: Computers are comfortable as long as we understand it as a tool and we

don't think that it's going to create answers, because it doesn't create answers.

It doesn't create architecture, it doesn't create good architecture. There has to

be a thought in the human brain, and the computer is just not going to do it.

Now one of the deficits, I think, right now, is the computer can create

complex geometry very, very easily. Therefore, especially young architectural

designers just coming out of school can create all kinds of configurations,

massing, colorations of very great detail. Now whether or not it's practical,

whether or not it makes any architectural sense other than geometric design,

I personally think that that question is still open. So I think it's dangerous in

the sense that it takes away from human interaction to some extent,

especially in the discussions between architects and engineers, architects and

clients, engineers and clients, architects and architects. There's a tendency to

email. The Internet, I think, is very poor in that it takes away human

interaction. Architects or engineers need to sit down with their client and

look them in the eyes and come up and realize the solutions or the problems

or what both sides are looking for. That gets destroyed when you're able to

communicate by words or by "text-messaging" where all you say is, "Well, I

think it should be a green top." And your client says, "No, I think I'd like to

have a shade of pink." And it gets lost in between when we don't even know

what the top is yet, but we're going to have a green one or a pink one. Now

those are just subjective things, but it tends to destroy, in my terms, in my

history, the human contact. It turns away from knowing whether things are

right or wrong or reasonable or unreasonable. I think there are areas in which

the computer flows into architecture and engineering. Sometimes we hear

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people say, "Well, history is being rewritten by the computer." What's in the

computer is assumed by the current generation or next generation as being

right. It's the same in engineering or architecture or design, they can look

through a lot of past things and maybe what somebody inputted was good or

not good. How I know is that I've transitioned into the full computer age,

that we're in now, compared to the almost non-computer age. I know there

are many, many building designs from back there that are totally incorrectly

described, probably both engineeringwise and architecturally––well, that's

not too much different from somebody that disagreed with all the history

books they read about one of our presidents and now writes a new one. They

just decide, Well, okay, I'm going to write it this way. Well, if somebody picks

up that book without reading anything else ten years from now, then who

says that's not history?

Blum: So perhaps the computer is not as intelligent as is thought.

Korista: And it is happening to architecture and it is happening to engineering where

people just assume whatever is there, because it's in the computer, it must be

right. They're losing the knowledge base of critical thinking. Is it right, or not

right? Or, Gee, I have to go too fast in my life to really go back and see, well,

was my understanding right? Or was it not right? It is hard to get "hard"

information into a computer, especially from a technical sense, because a lot

of it is not just the design per the code or per some textbook; a lot of it is

basically imagination, interpretation, philosophical. All those things go into

the successful design. That kind of human experience information is very

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difficult to build into a computer. You don't find how to build this building?

What is up-down construction? We have engineers now that have been with

SOM for fifteen years, and many of those things, as soon as they run into it,

it's just like they ran into a brick wall. They have no idea, because there was

nothing to drive them backwards to see what had happened before, because

if they want an answer, they go on the computer. And yes, SOM has their

own x-amount of historical data, but most of the data is as we talked about

before, good for about ten years back. Well, there's a history of 1936 back

there, and although times change and ideas change that doesn't mean you

have to be following history, but if you're knowledgeable about history,

about what really was, it will help you make better decisions moving

forward in whatever it is. So there are difficulties, and I think a lot of it has to

do with the lack of human interaction. What they expect from the computer

is basically taking away the human response. Like you and I are talking here,

you can look me in the eye and I can look you in the eye. You're either saying

something or not saying something, but when you're doing business, it's

very, very difficult. And it's not just architecture and engineering, I think it's

across the board.

Blum: Well, the loss of human contact, they said that about television too.

Korista: And I think that is still true. I think especially with the advent of the Internet,

which happens to be a function of the computer, and the email and/or text

messages. It takes away all the imagination. You can say anything you want

to over the computer to someone. When it gets down to when you're trying

150 to talk about how great the top of this building is or not, and that's what your client wants to use and you send him a sketch but he has no idea what the sketch means, and you're trying to explain it to him; when you do it personally, he understands and you understand. And when you do it by email or texting, it just loses value. So in that sense, I may be of the old age, but I still think that we need to be careful because it's just go with the flow right now. Many of the young people say, "Well, that's what it is." And they'll say, "Stan, you're just an old guy. You don't know what it's all about." I think

I do know what it's all about. I'm not a great computer user, but my point is not to use or to use a computer; I think computers should be used, but they need to be used appropriately. You need to read about things, you need to study history and not just see only one page of a history book. You need to see more than one half of one page of a sketch of how the cladding went on

John Hancock building, and just forget everything else and say, "Well, I know what happened," because you don't. So I think it is a tool that needs to be really thought about. It's a complex tool, just like we're moving towards three-dimensional computerization. To get that done well, where it's an easy tool to work with, and for architects and engineers, to develop three- dimensional data versus just thinking in two dimensions, it's a lot harder.

Some of these things really have a fourth dimension built in. Now people are working time into it, so if you're doing energy studies and you're looking at sun variations and which way the building should be turned or which way the shades should be turned, they actually can put a fourth dimension in, which is time. So you're seeing things and developing things in three dimensions, but then you let time get in there. I'm trying to use a simple

151 thing of time, which you can be working three dimensionally, but the sun, which is a direct function of time will actually be moving, so you start to have time as a fourth dimension. But although you can do it as a point reference right now, there aren't groups out there developing computer software that is always appropriate. They just develop it and they're driven by business acumen. So they just develop it a little bit, and then they sell that piece; develop it a little bit more and sell that piece, then they go in another direction and sell that. So the effort is going to be monumental.

Unfortunately you get some of these things out, especially as far as graphic representation is and we'll call these working drawings. Now working drawings might be the output of architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, to give the contractor. It may not be just a printed drawing; it may be electronic files, but in those electronic files are the same thing as you've printed out. If they're not right and if they're not coordinated, then the contractor has no basis to go in any other direction. Another difficulty is there are a lot of computer software systems out there, there's a lot of different hardware systems out there, and even within one firm and one office of a firm like SOM, all the hardware and all the software, even though it has similar names, doesn't necessarily match up exactly. So once you go out of house and you give it to your client to do––well, he kind of understands,

"Well, I open up all these files to look at it." Contractors kind of do that, but it's still in the embryo stage of this, even with two dimensionality, but certainly with three dimensionality. There's good outlooks for it, but the amount of time and money to make it robust, so it's something that is really useable, is still in the future. It's a philosophical disagreement I have with

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basically why are we trying to develop the computer to do everything, when

the computer does nothing more than what you can tell it to do. And that's

true of almost every subject. Why do we want to recreate the human brain,

which is not used to very high capacity by anyone, even great thinkers, and

not make more use of that? Why get something to try to replicate that?

Realistically, philosophically, the background to computers is the human

brain. The binary digiting of zero and ones is more or less how, in very

simple terms, the electronics part of your brain processes things. So why are

we doing it?

Blum: Why do you think we're doing it?

Korista: I think there was a path in which it was progress; it was asking, why are we

still building gas engine cars? Well, that was kind of nifty, people like them,

and you could go more places. Why didn't we have steam engine? For a

hundred years the steam engine seemed to be the only way to go, and there's

still steam being used, but there's less steam being used. Why did Chicago

used to have street cars that ran on electricity, which was in the ground and

on rails that were in the ground? There was a line overhead and they ran by

electrical current, and it was very, very efficient economically, and

environmentally. And people said, "Oh yeah, but the bus can go to the curb

and you don't have to walk out to the middle of the street. Well, we have to

watch all new inventions. It's not saying that we don't move ahead; we

should always move ahead. Just like whether it's architecture or structural

engineering, we always want to move ahead. I feel that I've been part of

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moving structural engineering ahead for the types of projects I've worked on.

But just to move ahead blindly and just think that's good, no. That's why I

worry about many of the people coming out of school when they say, "Stan,

you're just old. That's the way it is." Whether they believe it or not, that's

what they have to do. They have to be able to run computer structural

engineering programs as fast as somebody else. They have to be able to make

drawings faster than somebody else. You ask, well, what are you thinking

about it? And you know that they're not because they're caught up in all the

mechanics of how the computer is being utilized. The thought process given

to what they're doing––you can just see it flow away.

Blum: Your observations and opinions are very interesting. You must work with

many young architects who rely heavily on the computer, maybe too much.

Korista: Architects and engineers. It's the same thing. You ask, after they've been

there and this has been going on, my observations probably are for ten to

fifteen years. Part of it is especially architects, get such a dosage on the

graphics side in school, they almost can't, if you give them a pencil and

paper, they can't sketch something because in school they've been asked to

do all their projects, all their project backup, all their artistic thing on the

computer. They say, all right, here's a computer program, which is probably

high-powered, do your sketching, do your thoughts on that. And you can say

that's a valuable tool, but just to go off and do these complex, geometrics––

complex because they look interesting––is that a thought? I mean, is

somebody developing a new architecture? If we look at some of the

154 architecture that's going on in the last five years around the world, we see not only twisted buildings which have some logic, but buildings that lean over and most common people would look at the building and say, "I'm not going in that building! It's going to fall over." And there's lots of those around the world: distorted, non-uniform, twisted, turned buildings. Did somebody really have that thought as an architectural thought? Or was it because [with] the computer it was easy to generate things and say, "Well, instead of doing a square building I did one with a notch here and go up and do a notch there."

Now does that draw people's attention? Does that draw clients' attention––at least when money is flowing––"I've got to have something that's different than anybody else." Sure it does! But is that architectural thought? Is that something that we can say, well, okay, the era of 2000-2020 was defined by…? What thought is out there now? What do you call all these irregular shapes, and many times irrational shapes, because they don't necessarily blend with the urban fabric. They don't blend with anything. Somebody will say it does, and somebody will say they're environmentally good, and somebody will say we were just trying to do it different, or we were trying to be tall. So I guess, yeah, I'm questioning if people can understand the computer as a tool, fine. But let your thoughts, let your design, let the final product be a function of your own human brain, which it has been in the past. So what we're seeing now in architecture and engineering, I think a lot of things. Something that's just happening now, since 1995, because the computer, especially the PC, the laptop, the various phone systems that are out there now are just going faster and faster and faster and give you some kind of data, but what is it? And no one knows what it is! You want a picture

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of something? Okay, here's my phone. There's a picture of it. Did you really

take a picture of that? Or did you take a picture of something else? And a lot

of times people simply don't know. They say, "That's what it is." Okay. I'll

quit on that note. That's a subject that has nothing to do with the partners at

SOM or my work.

Blum: I think it does. Did SOM bring the computer into the mix with the Canary

Wharf job?

Korista: SOM was the leader in bringing computer utilization to the whole

architectural and engineering community, at least in the United States and

probably worldwide. When I first came to SOM, we got the first actual

computer in SOM, privately owned. It was in Chicago. There weren't

computers in the other offices probably for another almost ten years. And

yes, most of the early ones, which were still punching cards––were for

structural engineering work because that was related to numerical number

crunching. There was not anything possible as far as graphics go. And it was

all right; we found a way to make it economical for an architectural and

engineering firm, albeit a big one. But there were still firms out there as big as

we were that would not get into the computers and architecture. Now that

was the mid-1960s. Well, it was all the way until the mid-1980s that we

started to get reasonable enough computer graphics, and we certainly saw

the path forward. Look, if we can do it for numbers… and then of course,

business applications crept in there, but not very fast. And the architectural

designers say, "Well, you can't draw any pictures on it so I'll keep sketching."

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Fine. So it was almost the mid-eighties to 1990 before we went ahead and

developed our own graphical system on the computer, because simply

nobody else was doing it and we were leading the field. Even though the

whole task never got done with IBM, then we got into not only PCs but other

people tried to get into the graphics field at least from the simple end of it.

We had a very powerful tool in what we developed AES. It was just that we

couldn't keep developing it without some capital source from outside

because it was way too expensive. When we were developing the AES

program from 1985 to about 1990, we had 150 people just in SOM doing

nothing more than computer programming and computer science.

Blum: Oh, that was quite an on-going investment in the computer.

Korista: They weren't doing anything specific to A/E project design. Now how did

we justify that? Well, because IBM was basically funding it based upon

selling software downstream. That's why most architectural/engineering

firms can't do that. It just costs way too much money for software

development.

Blum: Was SOM was big enough and rich enough to go it alone?

Korista: Well, SOM was big enough at the time. But no, I think we had a contract with

IBM, and IBM, in essence, was paying for it. The intellect of wanting to go

there was there, and we drove that and drove that and drove that. So as you

go around today, almost every architectural firm or engineering firm is on

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the computer. But if you look back, well, how many were on the computer in

1985? Or how many were on the computer in 1990? You'd see this curve go

way down on whether it's graphics or engineering. Number one, there was

cost because computer systems, even using other people's software, was

expensive. You've got to keep changing the hardware; you've got to keep up-

to-date with software, so it's an expensive task, let alone there's training.

Everyone lacks in training people instead of throwing out the video game

discs that come on computers. The kids start playing with those very young

and there's no instructions with them. You just start pushing the numbers

and letters. And then you kind of learn how to play it. Well, when you're

trying to do architecture and engineering and you just say, well, here's a new

program. Now here's five sentences about how you do it. And then you've

got to do this and you do that. Well, I mean that part is training. A lot of it is

self-training, because that's what people are used to. There should be much

more of firm training, not only with our own firm, but with other firms.

Blum: Who was in charge of your computer department?

Korista: Well, it's varied in time. We have a much smaller group because it's basically

gone from a design group when we were doing AES, when it was actually

designing computer software, to now a kind of system where most of the

people that are in the IT group are involved with the graphics or graphic

representation of the software that's out there and coordination between

different systems, versus doing any programming. Most of the hardware has

become much more stable. It didn't always used to be so stable, i.e., you had

158 a lot more computer flops than we do today and we all go through those. But each office has its own group. Now within the disciplines, it's difficult, especially in the engineering disciplines where we have a lot of other engineering software that the architects don't know anything about and don't want to know. Trying to keep that up, we have probably two or three people in each discipline that are just keeping up with the software. How can you install it within our system? How do you maintain it in our system? How do you utilize it within our system? So it's difficult. Computers are not yet friendly from a business production type of thing, for work like architecture and engineering, which is highly variable. So we hear a lot of people on the three-dimensional programs, from the car manufacturers and they say, "Oh yeah, we've been using this three-dimensional stuff for fifteen years now."

But most of their work, for the buildings that they're doing, for the assembly plants, is they do one, then they do another one, they do another one, they do another one. They're virtually almost identical. So when you have repetitious things, the computer understands that, so you get to have repetition. Now most architectural firms, especially like SOM where every project is different, located in some other place in the world. It's very difficult because you have variety, and the computer is not good at variety. The computer is good at repetitions. Number crunching is repetitious, building the same thing over and over is repetitious. Data filing can be repetitious, okay. But again, the era of data storage from drawings that the client can use so he knows how many pieces of glass he has in the buildings, mixing that into the three-dimensional batch, that's still kind of embryonic. Can it be done? Yes. Is it easily done yet?

No. So people say, "Oh yeah, we can do that." And then you find out, well,

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okay, 1 percent of somebody can do that, but it's not really viable for 99

percent as far as producing. So we're still in an embryo stage. My concern is

more of a philosophical one of people believing the computer will think for

you.

Blum: Because SOM had worldwide projects, was the computer helpful in bridging

the gap?

Korista: I think a lot times we brought, not so much in the last five years, but we

brought computer technology both from a graphic standpoint and from an

engineering standpoint to widen the utilization of a lot of overseas clients.

Probably from 1985 on we did a lot of that. Before that we had computers,

and our overseas clients invariably didn't have computers.

Blum: But you actually brought it to the job?

Korista: Well, the idea, look, you can do graphics and that helps. Okay? And you can

visualize things better; if you can do them in three dimension[s] that's good.

Engineeringwise we can look at some more different options, whether it's a

concrete structure or whether it's a steel structure or whether it's a

combination structure. Mechanical engineers go farther into energy savings

and worrying about where the sun is compared to the walls, and so forth. I've

never met any dumb people around the world. They would see this and then

they would say, "Okay, what kind of software are you using and what kind

of hardware?" A lot of the hardware worldwide––up until right now but I

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think it's changing––has come from the U.S. IBM was a heavy producer of

hardware overseas. They might have used more local software, but a lot of

the U.S. software, especially for structural engineering was basically U.S.-

based software development. They'd take it over there; they might translate

it into Chinese or into German, and then as time continued on, they

developed many of their own programs.

Blum: Has globalization been good for SOM?

Korista: I think globalization has been. Because that's the economic path for business,

You're going to become isolated if you only want to work in one city or

country.

Blum: Has it created or has it destroyed jobs?

Korista: Globalization, I think in my terms of globalization is that we're… I guess I

would hope that outsourcing is not necessarily a definition of

internationalization or globalization. I think the U.S. has been caught in too

many places outsourcing. We can say SOM has tried it; it hasn't been that

successful. You're constantly chasing where the labor rates are less, because

it's not that people are dumb here or dumb there, but the wage rate is less.

Outsourcing is a phenomenon that really came after 1991. I mean really

where everybody was trying after the 1991 economic turndown. Maybe it's

the cause of what we have today, some of the financial problems, because

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people kept outsourcing. They go first here, and then the next country would

come online and it would go here.

Blum: Did that happen in architecture too?

Korista: In a very limited way, but people have and are still trying outsourcing.

Blum: Well, maybe outsourcing happened in the reverse, that countries overseas

were using SOM?

Korista: You could say that certainly anytime you go overseas and are working in an

area that hasn't done a thousand of those things already, and that's usually

not the project we're in, because we usually lead the way in the next tallest

building or next biggest building that nobody wants to contend with.

Obviously people are going to pay attention to what you're doing, and seeing

if the next one they can't do themselves, or more of it themselves, or have

SOM do it but not as much. So you can say in that sense, it's not outsourcing

but it's similar on their part to gain knowledge and then utilize the

knowledge with, "Oh, we still want you for some ideas." So yeah, there's a

danger in globalization of people, especially in architecture and structural

engineering, especially that people are always interested to pick your brain of

your knowledge––not your computer, but your brain––and then use that

over and over again. And then, "Well, I'll let you do the next variation." And

then pick your brain on that and they do it over and over again. You'd be

naïve to believe that people are not learning from things.

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Blum: There was an important structure that you worked on in the early eighties,

and it was a sports facility, the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Korista: Yes.

Blum: How did that come about?

Korista: Well, it came about because we were actually involved in a competition. The

sports teams, the Minneapolis pro teams, were basically using an outdoor

stadium for baseball and football, like many places were. We were just

starting, in other places in the country, using enclosed stadiums. The hard

roof, or so-called hard roof of the Astrodome in Houston and the Silverdome

in Pontiac, Michigan, were both instigated by pro teams saying, "Well,

wouldn't it be nice if you have bad weather and…" In other words, it's too

hot in the South, it rains, or it's too cold and snows in the North, "Wouldn't it

be nice if we could just keep going in the same facility?" So you could play

football and then you could play baseball and you could play basketball, so it

was that thought, and different owners were getting together and helping to

fund it. Well, that's what the thought process was in Minneapolis. The

baseball team and the football team had different owners, but they felt they

would be willing to fund some of it. So it was actually a state project, not too

dissimilar to when, in Chicago, the White Sox stadium was redeveloped. It

was really financed by the state, and the professional teams pay it back as far

as the rent. The Metrodome was a state project, and their intent was to have

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professional baseball, football, and also college baseball and football and

basketball and all kinds of events. So we got involved in it as far as the

competition, and we went through a lot of different kinds of roofs. They

became enamored, because it was enamoring right then, with the pneumatic

roof. Basically David Geiger and Horst Berger had done a lot of work with

fabric roofs. They were actually the developers of what was in the

Silverdome, which was done just prior to this. You take a very, very

lightweight roof fabric, which is relatively cheap, and you simply keep

blowing air inside of it, and it's not necessarily a lot of air. That keeps it

inflated like a balloon. That was the concept that was finally chosen. So we

actually consulted with David Geiger when we did the Metrodome. The

bottom portions of it were just economical design of concrete, and how do

you site the field, and programming. It's the only indoor stadium that was

really designed for baseball and football and basketball and soccer and other

events.

Blum: Did it work for all of those sports equally well?

Korista: It's worked for all them. It was finished in 1982, so we actually designed that

and it was built in less than thirty-six months because the [Minnesota] Twins

baseball team wanted to open on April 2, 1982, and we actually got it done.

So it was a very good project as far as coordination between the contractor

who came on early, and the design that tried to keep it as simple and

straightforward as possible. The pneumatic roof or fabric roof was

innovative. So it was a good project and it was a very economical project

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even in today's costs. The simplest stadium today, even an outdoor stadium,

is probably like––they're talking about the Olympic stadium––like $360

million. The Metrodome, albeit twenty-five years ago, was only like $50

million. So those are big gaps.

Blum: How has that concept held up over the years?

Korista: Now today, sports owners and sports fans, they say, "Oh, gee, it's not

baseball unless we're outside and have rain delays." Where football fans say,

"Well, if it snows, we like to be outside in the snow." So now in Minneapolis

they're actually building a new baseball stadium, which is just outside, and a

new football stadium which is just outside, and their only complaint against

the Metrodome is, "Well, it's too loud inside." In other words, all the fans are

too loud. But they forget to tell you that they've had for football––even

though their team hasn't won that many championships––about twenty years

of 100 percent filling all the seats. Their baseball team has a relatively high

capacity plus, they use that place about 365 days a year. They've had the

University of Minnesota play basketball in stadium. They've had professional

basketball, they've had soccer, and they've had all kinds of other events from

dirt bikes to circuses.

Blum: Is it still paying its way?

Korista: Oh yeah, as far as the state goes, because they still own it and these other

users just basically paid rent; it's been a goldmine. Now you don't hear that

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because you hear the fans saying, "Oh, it's just so loud in there you can't

hear."

Blum: Why is it so loud? Because of the roof?

Korista: It's the closed roof––they enclose some of the sound, sure. There's an

acoustical two-layer roof up there, which in the wintertime you blow air

through the two layers, and that actually heats the outside layer to melt the

snow. The snow up there can be very heavy. But this lower baffle is really an

acoustical baffle. It has some holes in it. So it's noisy. If anybody's been to a

University of Michigan or University of Notre Dame football game that plays

in outdoor stadiums and they have like 100,000 people there for a college

football game, is the noise much greater than that? No. But for 45,000 or

50,000 people inside of this domed stadium, yeah, they say, "Well, it's just so

noisy." And people say, "Instead of being inside, wouldn't it be nice to be

outside?" So it's just personal ego of the fans and owners.

Blum: I read about a collapse of the roof because the snow piled up so much.

Korista: The first winter that the dome was inflated, which was late in the fall of 1981,

all of the mechanical systems weren't yet completed, but they wanted to get

the roof up. Once you get the roof in place in a concave shape, you don't

want it to snow, because it would fill up. So you want the roof inflated

upward. They inflated it, but all the mechanical systems weren't complete. So

in the heating cycle, where the mechanical systems that heat us, starts heated

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air going up along the bottom surface of the roof fabric and it drops down

and heats the people inside and then you recirculate it. Well, it's like the

heating cycle wasn't all there, even though they were still blowing air. It

wasn't outside air, but it wasn't warm enough and they didn't get it turned

on enough since the stadium was not yet occupied, to melt the snow as it

touched the roof fabric surface. So during an earlier than normal wet snow

they did have a rip, and I was up there…

[Tape 4: Side A]

Korista: Yeah, the roof was still standing with this big hole in it. It just showed how

much robustness it had. People were all concerned about what happens if

there's a hole in the roof and it all comes down on top of the people. Now,

number one, it probably wouldn't really hurt, because the fabric is so light

and the cables are not very big cables, so if it just came down like that and

you happened to be sitting there, you'd feel something but not much. Now

under this huge rip there were no people, there were still workmen. But this

rip was at one end, as you looked at the roof instead of being inflated like

this, it was kind of dipped in the rip but the rest of it was still inflated. So that

was kind of positive proof, although you'd like it not to have happened to the

stadium, that even if you ripped part of the roof because of snow, it's not

going to collapse. It's still going to stay up there. Now they did worry about

snow, and we did special wind tunnel studies that were just for snow and

how much snow there was. It was done several times, and the owner actually

had two different wind tunnel groups study snow and snow accumulations,

because they can actually, in a wind tunnel, make it behave like the wind

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deposition on a roof. So they were more careful about it. They'd be sure the

heating system was on, because the idea was to get the roof warm, the outer

fabric warm so as snow hits it, it would melt and run down. So the thing was

getting the heat on, not waiting till after there's a twelve-inch snow and then

you turn it on. If they do have a problem, then they go up there, literally, like

they did at that time. You can walk up there. It's not so steep you can't walk

on it. Along the cables there were safety hooks, so they actually go up there

and just shovel snow so it falls down to the ends, which is where the drains

are anyway. But it's never had a new problem. That rip was the first year,

and the reason was there was no warm air. They just didn't get the heat going

fast enough.

Blum: Was there any connection between the Metrodome, which had a fabric roof,

and the airport in Jeddah that also had a fabric roof?

Korista: Yes, the Jeddah Airport came just before this, and certainly, we were

interested in fabric and cable roofs, especially the engineering of them and

the architecture of them. Generally in the U.S., the Jeddah-type fabric roof, is

called a tensile fabric roof; it is expensive compared to other hard roofs. It

doesn't necessarily fit a stadium, because you need some interior supports

even if they'd be widely spaced. So it did lend itself to things like airport

terminals, the Hajj terminal and to convention centers like in Vancouver,

British Columbia, the Millennium Dome in London, and so forth. People can

pass through, but you're not trying to create a whole enclosed stadium. After

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the Metrodome there were two or three more stadiums that were done with

pneumatic inflatable fabric roofs.

Blum: Did you work on any these?

Korista: No, they were just done in the U.S., and then people kind of lost interest.

Blum: Such a good solution, why did it disappear?

Korista: Because there was a period of time from about the mid-eighties to probably

the mid-nineties where people in the sports weren't looking for new

stadiums. Then we started the next drift that is the one that's gone probably

from 1995 till now, and you see movable roofs, which are hard roofs. They're

not necessarily fabric; they're structural steel members, not cables. Some of

them have some fabric panels built into them. You're simply up there, just

like you had a steam engine moving a roof back and forth and moving it this

way. So probably the last ten or fifteen stadiums in the U.S. that have been

built, and even other places in the world, they've had movable roofs. Now

the movable roof costs yet more because there's more mechanisms. It

probably costs more to maintain, although it's a very controllable type of roof

system. The tensile fabric roof is more of an architectural element, and in the

U.S. it costs more, for people building with it. The technology wasn't here; it

was more overseas or the economics of it was more overseas. So there was

much more tensile fabric used in Europe for special structures.

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Blum: Sports facilities?

Korista: Sports structures or arenas or just outdoor people-gathering places where

you wanted a sunshade or something. You saw a lot of them. If you walk

around the U.S. today, in the last twenty years, you do see more. The biggest

application was probably at the Denver airport. At the new airport terminal

there's a lot of tensile fabric.

Blum: But was that done after this?

Korista: Yeah, that was done, really finished up in the nineties. Vancouver Exhibition

Center has a large tensile fabric roof that was done in the late eighties. You

see a lot of small things, just in shopping centers you'll actually see tensile

fabric on a small scale of the Jeddah roof. Tensile fabric means you have to

pull the fabric so it's always in tension purposely. A pneumatic dome is when

you push air into it so it expands like a balloon, and then just like the outside

of a balloon, it's in tension. But if you don't blow in it, it's going to come back

and just settle back down. Tensile fabric, you pull it apart to begin with and it

stays stressed. And if it doesn’t, then you have a problem.

Blum: Apparently the Metrodome is known as Minnesota's rec room. Are you

familiar with that nickname?

Korista: Well, rec room could mean a lot of things. It's known for its being noisy. And

the other thing that we know, because we've helped them with various things

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over the years, is it's been very successful for all kinds of things besides

professional sports.

Blum: Like a rec(reation) room in your home.

Korista: They have conventions in there; they have circuses in there. They have motor

racing in there; they have motorcycle bike racing in there; they have fairs,

you know, like you go to a people fair or an exhibition. They use it as an

exhibition hall because there's nothing in Minneapolis that's anywhere near

that size. So just like we use McCormick Place, they use the Metrodome for

that. Now if that's how they get rec room out of it, okay.

Blum: That seems like a reasonable explanation. In 1982, Fazlur Khan died. What

was your connection with him?

Korista: Well, Fazlur was certainly, in structural engineering, one of my two primary

mentors. If I said there were mentors, it would probably be both Faz and Hal

Iyengar although we worked a lot in parallel. Certainly Faz and Hal worked

much closer together and as their own mentors, Faz for Hal. I was the next

branch that was coming up, and since then Bill Baker and I have worked

pretty closely together. Now Bill's a partner in structural engineering. We

have a system and it's hard to do, but purposely we've tried to have people

that could come in and mentor the person after them. Fazlur was certainly

there when I was there. I didn't have a chance to work with him that much.

As I say, one of the first jobs was working on John Hancock, but that was not

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so much in the design; it was actually in the construction part of it. Faz had a

little bit of a role in the New World Center, which was in Hong Kong. So it

was an off-and-on type of thing. I guess he saw that I was someone who

could take on projects and move forward with them, so it was kind of a

parallel existence versus that of Hal and Faz who worked much closer

together. Certainly he was my mentor as far as ideas and goals and

developing the belief in the art of engineering. Not just engineering for the

sake of engineering, but by being involved from the beginning versus just

plug it in and being the workman that makes something work. Certainly Faz

was philosophically, very important in my career.

Blum: Did his death affect your career in any way within SOM?

Korista: I think it did. Since it was early in his life, it was certainly something that

made you stop and think and say, well, okay we had this group of people

that were leading the group––he being the uppermost level, and leading

SOM––so his death from that standpoint was way too early. He had instilled

in SOM, partly with Bruce and partly with others, this idea of the structural

engineer and the architect having to interrelate in a very intimate way. Some

buildings or most of the projects he worked on were structurally related. So

you could tell what the structure was. So if you have Hancock or you have

Sears or you have the Hajj terminal, you can see exactly where the structure

of it is. So the concept of structuralism in design, and the relationship of

architects and structural engineers working together and getting the

architects to understand that they can't just blow off the structural engineers,

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and that they can really work with you and make the end product better. Or,

as I say, physical––you create a physical entity and not just a conceptual

entity. So yeah, we all said now it's going to… I think his presence had set

enough of a vision in place that we could carry on, and I think we carried on

quite successfully. I would think wherever he is he'd be happy to see where

we went.

Blum: SOM started in the thirties as a very small firm. And it grew, and it grew, and

it grew, and it grew. Was SOM as effective as a huge firm, as it was as a much

smaller one?

Korista: Well, in my history, we've only had two huge, huge projects, one in the Hajj

terminal we'd done from about 1975 to 1980, where the total firm––Chicago

had the biggest work force––was probably 1400 people. So the total firm

must have been close to 2000 people. Then we probably went to about 1500 in

the late eighties when we were doing the Canary Wharf and Broadgate in

London. I think most of the time the actual number of partners, and the

partnership group has always been relatively small for the total number of

people. I think the partners in the past and partners even today would tell

you that they'd much rather practice architecture as a partnership in a small

to medium-size firm, and not in a huge firm. Part of that is logical because

huge firms just take more and more business skills, and management time,

and steals time away from thinking about conceptualizing, designing

buildings. There has to be more and more partners more and more concerned

about… Okay, you have 3,000 people, how do we do it? I think it becomes, if

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you're still in the mode of believing that you're doing architectural design

and you're an architectural firm, an architectural/engineering firm. I don't

think you want to be too big. Now there are a lot of large, large, large

architectural/engineering firms, but I think they lose something in the design

for the sake that they're very large. There's a lot of very large conglomerates

in the U.S. that have picked up architectural firms and engineering firms and

kind of get them to work together or sometimes not together. But I think you

do lose something. I think that's why many of the "U.S. star architects" in the

last twenty-five years have not chosen to practice as a larger partnership.

They've basically practiced as quite a bit smaller, limited number of partner

type of firms. In fact, most of the successful high-end architectural firms have

done that, and I think it's not just because they couldn't get bigger, it's just

that they chose not to get bigger.

Blum: In 1980, evidently, SOM was questioning their own direction. And there was

a symposium initiated by SOM at the Harvard Club to explore the direction

SOM should pursue after this kind of exchange of ideas. Were you in on that

symposium?

Korista: I wasn't involved directly with it, but I did read the paper that came out of it

that summarized just general thoughts. To me the forum was directed

towards most architectural firms, because the symposium was really focused

towards architecture and architectural firms versus architectural/engineering

firms, which is not too unusual. The Midwest and Far West had

architectural/engineering firms. That certainly wasn't typical of the East

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Coast. There were architectural firms and there were engineering firms only

that participated in this conference. I think the general conclusion was, at that

time, that there was a tendency for economic viability to conglomerate and

pull firms together into mergers. But as far as how people would like to do

architecture, they much preferred the smaller firm. At least that's what I

would get out of it.

Blum: What were some of the ideas in the paper that came down to you?

Korista: I think that would be my own synopsis of it, that architectural firms thought

they could do much better architecture in a relatively small firm, and I guess

the small firm that they were talking about was something, oh, as I recall, in a

firm that was 100 people or less. Now some firms were four people.

Blum: And SOM was?

Korista: And SOM was, at that point in time, that was…

Blum: Hundreds?

Korista: The other thing was, right there at the beginning of the eighties––this was

right before an economic hiccup happened––the damned hiccup.

Blum: The recession? The slowdown?

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Korista: Yeah, the recession happened, which hurt everybody, and some people

thought they saw that coming, and some people didn't think it was really

going to hit that hard, but it did. So I think probably that being right before

that happened, the idea of smaller firms were a primary thought, although

from a business standpoint, a lot of people––this is my own synopsis, okay?–

–a lot of people saw the necessity of firms combining just for financial

stability. However, if you combine firms you certainly could increase your

flexibility and offer different types of projects.

Blum: But SOM had the services all under one umbrella.

Korista: SOM was, at that point in time, unusual. Even in SOM, Chicago was the one

that did all kinds of buildings everywhere. If you went to New York, they

had always… Gordon Bunshaft had heavily relied on corporate headquarters

and work on the corporate side of it. Very honestly, the West Coast, they did

more things similar to Chicago. They did schools, but their heavy thing on

the West Coast for a long time, from the fifties until well into the eighties,

was health care. They were heavily into health care, albeit mainly on the

West Coast. They also did some commercial buildings too. New York did

very few schools, although they did some. Their main thing was corporate. In

Chicago, if you were to ask somebody from SOM Chicago, they'd say, "Well,

we just always have done everything, anywhere it was, all the time."

Blum: Were the SOM offices ever in competition with one another?

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Korista: Generally, the partners at least said they wouldn't be in competition with

each other for the same project with the same client.

Blum: How did that work?

Korista: In general, I think that's held true. There are many projects that came along

where different clients were on the same project, so the client who was

competing for the project might ask two different SOM offices. Probably

more times than not, one or the other of the SOM offices would decline to

participate. So there was a logic of trying not to be competitive against each

other anywhere.

Blum: There was a time early in SOM's history––I know Walter Netsch talked about

this––when he wanted approval for his design for the Air Force Academy he

took his design to New York for Gordon Bunshaft's approval. Was this the

system? Did Gordon have the final say over design in all the offices?

Korista: I think it's been off and on, in my tenure at SOM, over those forty-plus years,

pretty much the offices worked independently. The executive group of

partners, which usually were a couple of the more senior partners from each

office, not necessarily only design partner, but project partners too––they

would at least talk with each other more on probably business terms, or on

major projects and most of the things were major projects. So since we

weren't conflicting with each other, there weren't very many times that they

overrode each other. But I'm sure, certainly, knowing Gordon, but only

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having worked with him very, very little, probably there were times, as far as

he was concerned, he felt that he should say yes or no on every SOM project

that was done. I don't think that was really true, so to say that there was one

and only one design partner… any design partner you talked to thought he

should probably be solely responsible for his own design.

Blum: Gordon was the senior design partner.

Korista: He was the last of the original partners, so he was the senior design partner

from that standpoint. But pretty much, if a design partner wants to do

something, and it's businesswise viable, he does it. There have been times in

which people wanted to do something in a country outside of the U.S., there's

a thought process of why are we doing that. So the partners talked, but their

discussions have been mostly, business versus architectural design.

Blum: Well, at one time also, I understand that Chicago was the center for all of the

computers?

Korista: The computer technology that I mentioned earlier started in Chicago and

because mainly of structural engineering, probably because of Faz Khan, we

could use it. There wasn't an early computer tool there for architects to use.

So as far as Gordon Bunshaft is concerned, he said, "I'm not going to spend

any money on computers. What am I going to do with it in architecture?

What am I? I'm not a structural engineering office." That was true at the time

in 1965 when SOM first had a computer. So there was resistance in all the

178 offices, up through probably 1990 or even after that. But it's only right now that you can walk in and you see every architectural designer, including quite a few of the design partners, that are actually utilizing the computer to do design sketches. I don't believe in that, but they do. But that's relatively new. So although the New York office looks like they've been using computers forever, their impact on computers has probably been since 1990.

San Francisco developed probably not in the same way. So yeah, Chicago started computers in SOM, built up the systems, used them, and of course it was difficult. When computers first came online, Bruce Graham didn't want to have anything, particularly, to do with them. He was one that was sympathetic to engineering and technology, but computers… "What can I do?" Now this was Bruce talking in the 1980s. And it's true, for architects there still weren't tools there that they could easily use, so he said, "I'm not going to do that." Now on his projects in the late eighties, certainly computers were used to create the architectural and engineering drawings, and he certainly embraced them. Probably for the last couple of years when he was there he was a strong advocate of using computers and trying to move the

AES program ahead. Now he retired just short of when that IBM effort collapsed. But he was at least a promoter of them. Really when Myron and

Walter left, which was closer to 1980, computers other than in engineering analysis, mainly structural, there was nothing that was to their benefit. There were large battles in SOM why we should have computers through all the years, and mainly it was the structural engineering group against the rest of

SOM, because we were the ones that were making use of it. Business computers weren't that great yet, and MEP just never developed down that

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path, so there was always a battle going on. Slowly we'd win over some

design partners, because you know, whatever partners there were, twenty

partners, they all had to agree that they were going to go and spend a million

dollars for computers, because computer mainframes used to be much more

expensive than PCs are today. So certainly Faz had that vision. Faz himself

was not a computer whiz, but he promoted it; he saw that the computer was

a valuable future tool.

Blum: He saw the future for it?

Korista: As a tool.

Blum: Was centralization, also true for the business end of it?

Korista: Well, SOM has always had the three main offices, and in that respect,

certainly when they started in Chicago there were three people, and that was

two people too many in one office. I'm going back to Skidmore, Owings and

Merrill. When they started in 1936, they said, okay, there was kind of a

collective gathering; they saw a future, and from a business sense, certainly,

having an office in the main city on each of the coasts, on each of the coasts;

San Francisco versus Los Angeles and New York versus who knows what

else on the East Coast. That was certainly good logic for moving. Now

certainly, the New York office started early; it started almost, I think it was, a

year after the Chicago office, in 1936 or 1937.

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Blum: Chicago was the first office, it opened in 1936; it was followed soon after by

the New York office.

Korista: 1936, yeah. But they split apart pretty quickly. To me, in the beginning there

were two people, soon followed by a third, and they had different addresses.

They each had their own, and businesswise it also made sense. Regardless of

what other secondary offices we've had, the original three offices have

maintained themselves. Even though there were tries to be collective––and

there were times where they've been more collective than others––pretty

much the partners somehow have found ways in which to work together on

a business aspect of it while pretty much all of the offices have operated

independently. Their kind of architecture, it was never geographic; any

partner could stimulate business anywhere. It's still true today, so Chicago

could do projects in New York City, we didn't do very many; and New York

could do them in Chicago. The Chicago office was just more diverse; it had

people that were reaching out all over. I never quite figured it out, but it was,

even going back to the early post-war years [1952-1954] where SOM did a lot

of work out in Okinawa. That was mostly out of Chicago office, and the San

Francisco partners said, "Well, look, Chicago obviously went overseas." I

have always wondered why New York hardly ever goes overseas and San

Francisco rarely does. In my whole SOM life of forty-plus years, it was

always just natural in Chicago to have a project overseas, or in Chicago, or

Atlanta, or Los Angeles. If you talk to the people in other offices, even today,

they say, "Oh no, we work mostly on projects in New York City or in San

Francisco," even though they've done more international work in the last five

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years. So they've operated pretty much independently, with the business end

trying to keep them together. I'm sure there were more than enough

discussions and arguments or disagreements. I think the flexibility and the

interests of people about different projects at different times in their careers,

and the idea of having SOM succeed itself when one of the original partners

died, then well, that's all it is, they close it up. They wanted to let SOM

mature and continue on. SOM's gone through, some people say it's four

cycles, some people say it's five cycles of partners in seventy plus years. So

far, I think the firm's succession has worked because it was never tied into

one small type of architecture. It was probably never tied into wanting to be

the lead architectural design guru, but it was interested in quality

architecture from concept all the way through to completion. Those are

different points, but so far it's succeeded, even though there's been ups and

downs.

Blum: Would you speak a little bit about the current situation regarding the design

competition for the United States Air Force Academy Chapel?

Korista: Well, there's the Air Force Academy, which was done originally by SOM

when it originated, which is, the design and the construction were between

about 1952 and 1956 or 1958. It was basically done in Chicago. There were

some portions of it that were looked at in New York; San Francisco really

wasn't that involved. It was the basic initial campus for the Air Force

Academy, of which probably the outstanding piece of architecture, because

the government was only interested in one outstanding piece of architecture

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at the time, it was the chapel, the non-denominational Air Force Academy

Chapel. The other buildings, people would say they're pretty much routine

classroom, office buildings which were four- and five-stories. SOM did a

master plan. Walter Netsch was heavily involved in this, but other partners

were also. It was very successful when they went on. The chapel, I think, was

a really nice architectural thing. It did not have any religious orientation, it

was non-denominational, and I think that it turned out very… It was

executed very well. The Air Force, themselves, have always seen it as kind of

the high point. Over the years, they did expand, but they didn't expand with

many buildings. About fifteen years ago, somewhere in the early nineties,

they were interested in doing another master plan, for which they actually

came to SOM and some others to look at a master plan.

Blum: Had Walter retired by then?

Korista: Walter had retired, and there probably wasn't anybody left around that

actually had originally worked on it by that time. And they talked with

David Childs, who was one of the senior SOM partners at the time, and they

did some work. The Air Force really wasn't sure if they really wanted to re-

master plan the whole thing or not. Then somewhere in the mid-nineties to

late nineties, they were looking at archiving, which has nothing to do with

designing of buildings. The Air Force wanted to archive the Air Force

Academy and all its buildings; part of that was for maintainability and part

of that was because they were actually historically interested. So there was a

fairly good effort to try to find all the drawings that still existed and related

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correspondence, of which I think even the Art Institute of Chicago was

involved in parts of that, which they did. I'll say I don't know exactly why,

but New York played a fairly good role, and Chicago did also. Somewhere in

the early 2000s, I think it was after 9/11, they asked SOM to come back and

take a look at the Air Force Academy Chapel structurally and architecturally.

The only problem they had had, over the years, with the chapel was water

leakage.

Blum: What part did David Childs play in all this?

Korista: They actually talked with David. By that time David was retired as a

consulting partner, but because he was the last one they had worked with,

because there was nobody in Chicago that they had worked with, I think it

slipped over to David and the New York office. We went ahead with that,

which was completed about a year ago, a year and a half ago. We did all the

structural work in Chicago, and New York did the architectural/technical

work. Really we didn't take the structure down, but we took apart the

structure of the exterior cladding system, which makes up all the fins on the

outside, and came up with some new ideas for putting that back on. They

didn't wind up taking it all off, but they took quite a bit of the cladding off.

The structure just remained there. So that was really the last contact with the

Air Force Academy. So this new potential project, which only came up about

three months ago, with them finally deciding that now is the time they're

going to go ahead with this new building for information technology, or

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actually information management. They actually said, "Well, SOM why don't

you come and give us a concept? We'll price it and see how much it costs."

Blum: Did they ask SOM, New York?

Korista: No, they said just SOM; they didn't point at anybody particularly. Then, I

presume, someone from New York responded, "Well, okay." I think someone

from the Air Force said, "Well, you in Chicago have done stuff here. Maybe

we should get something from both offices, and maybe we'll just get ideas

from all three." So that was very unusual that all three offices of SOM would

do independent concepts.

Blum: And who proposed that?

Korista: That part I don't know.

Blum: Did it come from within SOM?

Korista: I think it was probably the Air Force just looking for new ideas. But I don't

know that for sure. They looked at SOM. Now they didn't look at SOM

Chicago, and New York, and San Francisco all working differently.

Blum: Well, they were pretty distinctive, each of the offices.

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Korista: Yes, they are, but to outsiders, they don't know. The usual thing that comes

in on a project is somebody will contact SOM, and they don't know… maybe

they'll know a partner, know SOM buildings, and it gets confusing. Okay,

well, what part of SOM did I talk to? The first person I talked to? Or the

second or third person I talked to? Or gee whiz, we're closer to San Francisco.

Well, this is closer to Chicago, but I could believe it just evolved that way

saying, "Well, why not get three ideas and we'll take the best one." But that

was unusual; the idea of us competing directly against another office is not

something we do. I'm sure if there were other architects doing this for this

building, we probably would have declined and one office would have done

something.

Blum: Was SOM the only firm that was being considered and then they asked for

more proposals?

Korista: SOM was the only firm that was asked to go ahead. There may have been

some other proposals, but they decided on SOM. I think they just decided

they wanted an SOM building for this building. They had worked, between

1956 and now, certainly with other architects for other basic classroom-type

buildings.

Blum: And the job went to New York.

Korista: I think it did. That's just breaking news like today! Whether that's 100 percent

true or not, I don't know. Structurally we'll wind up doing the structural

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engineering for it, well, Chicago's the structural engineering hub, so we will

have somewhere between four or five engineers on the project.

Blum: Will you be involved in that?

Korista: Well, now since I'm only on a consulting basis, I was already involved in

Chicago, so hopefully, sure. It's interesting. I come the closest to having

worked on the Air Force Academy.

Blum: In 1980, SOM founded the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, and that

was the SOM foundation. What was that all about? How did it come to be?

Korista: Well, I'm sure there were some entities outside of academia, in architecture,

that were doing something similar to that, although probably not very

successfully. Most of the foundations were attached to academia somehow,

or maybe art institutes that were nominally engaged in talking about

architecture and engineering. So I think the partners said, well, why can't we

have something that we can put some funds aside for? Some of it could be for

architectural research, and some of the funds could be towards trying to let

young people do something outside of academia while they're in school?

And I think those were the two primary ideas. Faz Khan, I know, was heavily

involved even though he was an engineer. And his biggest point was why

don't we try to facilitate architectural schools or engineering schools––but

mainly architectural schools––and fund somebody that's doing a master's

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degree to let them wander around the world and look at architecture for six

months or so?

Blum: And would the foundation underwrite that?

Korista: Yes, and a part of the foundation is still doing that. Physically, that was

probably the largest initial step, and there's still a student competition that

goes on. Students, I think they have to be in their master's degree or Ph.D.

studies, most of them architects. Some years, depending upon how much is

funded by SOM, there's an architect, a structural engineer, a mechanical

engineer and there's a planner given awards. I think it's been up to like six

different individuals in different disciplines in one year that have been

funded.

Blum: Are these grants given every year?

Korista: Some years. The amount of money varies depending on how much we have

because SOM is the sole contributor to the foundation, or at least it has been.

Initially the foundation took off in a lot of different directions. People tried to

use it as a foundation that just promotes architectural things, in-house

architectural showings, talks on the philosophy of architecture, and

engineering. In 1980, when SOM was getting hit with a stressful financial

time, it didn't have substantial funds, but at least it kicked off this idea. In

1982 the student award was the first one. Most of the students that have come

and won this competition, whatever discipline they're in, the vast majority of

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them don't necessarily come back to SOM. The idea was not in some way to

capture new employees; it was really to get introduced to SOM, and SOM

would fund their travel, specifically to study architecture. For six months

they could just go wherever the money would take them. They could go one

place; they could go multiple places. And they wrote just a short report after

that. So it's had all kinds of history. There have been more people and less

people and they do reports.

Blum: And does the program still exist?

Korista: Oh, yeah. It still goes on, hopefully it goes on.

Blum: Whose idea was it initially?

Korista: Well, the foundation was more of an intellectual concept. Faz Khan was the

one who was really pushing the student idea. Part of that came from he and

Myron working down at IIT, and because he spent a lot of time down there

promoting students to think about things. Forget about whether it was ever a

real project or not.

Blum: Or whether the building could stand up?

Korista: Yeah, but you know, I think that things came out of that that turned into real

buildings. So it's still on, but that was one of the more tangible things. There

were other things, when you say a foundation, well, they fund some things:

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SOM developed books, they developed some people coming to SOM talking

that weren't part of SOM.

Blum: Guest lecturers?

Korista: Yeah, lecture kind of things, people between offices that helped a little bit.

I'm sure there were some donations to other things. Later on it involved a lot

of different lives and it had different names. For a while, in the middle to late

eighties, SOM was higher on the horse as far as moneymaking, and we

bought the Charnley House and remodeled it for a period of five or six years

until the 1991 economic downturn hit. Then we decided that owning

property and trying to maintain it, even though it's of historical significance,

was probably not possible. But during those five or six years, we did remodel

the house trying to get it back to its original condition. Actually we had some

people come in from both academia and architecture and spend a year. They

could just do research or whatever they'd like to do in architecture. It was

mainly, not engineering, but architecture. So there were two or three

residents who actually stayed there, lived at the house. There were outside

lectures, and so forth. SOM donated a lot of the up-front money for founding

the Chicago Architecture Foundation. There was a lot of up-front money that

SOM put in when that group was getting going. The foundation was not-for-

profit and there were, I'm sure, some tax advantages and so forth. They tried

to promote, on a limited scale, a foundation that at points in time was open

for others to donate to or be part of it. Stanley Tigerman was pretty good pals

with Bruce Graham.

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Blum: Well, was he on the advisory board?

Korista: Yeah, at times there's been an advisory board. Other times there hasn't been.

So it really is the ebb and flow, but they've tried to at least keep some aspect

of it. It's just that––what sources are you going to get funding for? Well, not a

whole lot of sources are getting funding.

Blum: So the money came from SOM when they had a good year?

Korista: Mostly from SOM, the partners of SOM. So there's never been great amounts

of money. There have been times it was open to others, and they tried to get

others to donate. But you know, in the architectural field, why is somebody

going to donate to somebody else's foundation even if it's a good idea? That

kind of rides a little bit and it doesn't ride a little bit. Every foundation or

institute or museum is looking for their own money, and we couldn't spend a

lot of time and money just promoting that. And they still do fund it and it

ebbs and flows. If it's a more profitable year, then there's more money.

Blum: Have you worked with any of the students that were given a stipend?

Korista: Yes. In fact, the first one that was ever selected was a structural engineer.

That was 1982, and he actually elected to come here to SOM Chicago for six

months.

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Blum: Where was he from?

Korista: He was from Germany, Werner Sobek. He has his own firm now that

competes with us. He was from the University of Stuttgart. They're all bright

people. The initial idea was for these people to actually come here. I think

now the way it is the students have to write a paper of what they would do

and why they think it's relevant to architecture and engineering.

Blum: Do you mean to write a proposal when they apply for a grant?

Korista: They usually get multiple proposals. Of course, they don't have to come to

SOM and stay at SOM anymore; they basically are just funded to go outside

of SOM and do whatever they would like to do. The engineers wander; you

might have an engineer that just is interested in bridges, so he goes around,

visits and studies bridges. So it's not forced upon anybody, but people do

compete and they still compete. There's a partner group that keeps changing

every two years. I think there's four or five people on it that read all these

student proposals and select them.

Blum: Have you ever been on the board?

Korista: Yeah, quite a while ago. When I was a partner I was on there for a couple of

years, and it was interesting. Sometimes you do have students that would

rather come to SOM, but not do project type of work but rather to do

philosophical work or special work. In the last ten years, we have had what's

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called the SOM Ideas book, or something like that. It is just taking

engineering/architectural concepts, not real buildings but just concepts and

people's sketches. You can talk to a partner and you get to write up a little

concept and put the sketch in there.

Blum: Have they been published?

Korista: Yes, but I'm not coming up with the right name but yeah, there's…

Blum: Was it the SOM Journal that's published, I think, once a year?

Korista: There is an SOM Journal too. But this is something like SOM ideas, and

maybe they've been incorporated together or not. But a lot of those things do

not necessarily need a quorum to do it, somebody decides, a partner decides,

well, he'd like to do that. And they say, Okay. And some of it might be

funded out of the foundation. You had to be careful, because a foundation is

a foundation, so it's non-profit, so you can't take money out of it and say I'm

supporting my promotion program for it. That doesn't work too well, so they

do have to be careful. So there are a number of things like that that have

happened inside, but the foundation has been fluid.

Blum: Am I correct to understand that some furniture designs were patented and

built and they sold on the open market? And the proceeds of the sale of the

furniture came back to SOM?

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Korista: Yeah.

Blum: Did it come back to the foundation?

Korista: Some of it went to the foundation; some of it just came back to SOM. There

were various people in all of the offices that have done it; probably the New

York office did it more than other offices, and that's probably been more like

thirty years ago.

Blum: Does that still exist?

Korista: It can. It's pretty competitive because there's an awful lot of people out there

that are just doing that for a livelihood. We still have people that are

interested in doing that. Occasionally there'll be a project where you have a

corporate client or someone that's interested in doing their own custom

furniture, and sometimes they like to spin it off if they have something. It's

been done in all three offices; it's not so common today, I think just because

there's many people out there doing that kind of design. The monies that

came back, usually it was really up to the person that was designing it.

Usually they were partners. Generally the money came back to SOM and it

did become profit for the year. But it was put into something internal and

sometimes into the foundation after the foundation was founded. It's hard to

have Frank Lloyd Wright furniture over a sustained period of time. For a

short period of time you might have an interest, and of course you have to

have people that are interested in doing it and it's highly competitive. Adrian

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was very involved with a lot of the streetscape furniture on State Street, when

he did the State Street renovation that spun off all of these nice glass box bus

stops we have now. He did a lot of the design work on that, and then the

group that actually built them just somehow used Adrian's design.

Blum: I thought it was a French firm.

Korista: Yes, but they just took Adrian's design. We were supposed to be working

together, assuming that was okay with Mayor [Richard J.] Daley. But when it

got down to doing it, it was just the French group not SOM.

[Tape 4: Side B]

Blum: By 1990, the Chicago area had been overbuilt, and SOM apparently was in a

slump. This was the subject of an article in Newsweek. How did SOM handle

that?

Korista: Well, I think it wasn't just SOM. Everybody that dealt with real estate, which

was most of the architectural and engineering firms, got hit by a slump. The

U.K. had become very much interested in speculative-type development, like

we did in the U.S. In most places "spec development" was not the common

thing. Building things and the people will come; that was kind of a U.S.

phenomenon. Most other places people didn't build things until tenants were

found. So we got heavily into that in the U.K., and then their real estate

markets just collapsed, initially in the U.K. and then the U.S., for whatever

reason. There are thousands of reasons why. But since we had been building

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up staff in all our offices because of the U.K. work from 1985 till 1990 or 1991,

it had a significant impact as far as having to reduce people, not only in

Chicago. Chicago was doing most of the U.K. work at that time, so they were

kind of the main money driver for the firm, very honestly. And so when your

Chicago clients all of a sudden collapse, and the other offices also find their

clients collapsed, it was a difficult time. It wasn't just SOM, it was all firms.

The U.K. firms were all having the same problem. Then coupled with that

within SOM, several of the senior partners in San Francisco and in Chicago,

especially, but also some in New York, had been retiring, say, from 1985 till

1990. They were both design partners and project partners, which are

important to SOM as far as developing new work. So there was a drastic

reduction in manpower.

Blum: Are you saying that people were laid off and others retired?

Korista: Yeah, and whether it's 1991––I forget when––but it was in all the offices.

Chicago had built up the most for work in London––but even our London

office contracted way down––there was a huge contraction. It was basically

the flow of money and the idea that we can keep building because the last

year and the year before was good, so we project next year as being good.

Then it was kind of a blindside of why, all of a sudden, developers just said,

"No, no thank you. No more for right now." That hit everybody. So we had a

large reduction in staff. There was a lot of other considerations also; does

SOM really continue on as an architectural/engineering firm? If you talked to

Chicago or San Francisco, we always had architectural and engineering

196

disciplines within the same office. However in New York and the Northeast

region there were always architectural firms with engineering consultants. So

the New York office was always an architectural firm other than dabbling in

other things. Their consultants were either structural engineering from SOM

Chicago or structural engineering from other firms. So even within SOM

there wasn't total agreement with whether it should be an architecture-only

firm. Obviously it was getting smaller by business demand, but there was a

lot of discussion. Shouldn't it just be smaller? It would be easier to handle to

make all the offices smaller. So there was a lot of discussion on that, and

everybody just kind of banded together, for those that were left, and kept

working. The SOM name certainly still opened doors for those that were

starting to do things. We had a large project with Aramco in Saudi Arabia.

Blum: In the nineties?

Korista: Well, it started in 1991. That came out of almost left field. It was a

competition, but why Aramco would be interested in SOM, a corporate office

builder, okay, Chicago versus New York, I don't know. There was a

competition with others, and we won the competition, but that project was

kind of coming from somewhere you wouldn't normally think it was coming

from. There was no relationship between Aramco and us. Also that's right

about the time that Aramco was changing to where Saudi owned 100 percent

of it; it was no longer part Texas and part Saudi Arabia. And so they were

building their main headquarters. We worked on that for three or four years

and it was a large-scale project.

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Blum: Was the recession abating at that point?

Korista: Well, sure the recession was from 1991 till probably 1994 or 1995. I don't

know whether it's a recession or not, but certainly everything kind of slowed

down especially in real estate. Then you got the high-tech computer boom in

the last of the nineties, which perked up all around the world. It was really

when the Internet boom came in and that kind of perked things up. Then

China came online and started talking about catching up with the rest of the

world. In 1993 we entered a competition for Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, and

that was going to be the first tall building, which it was, in China. We were

just one of only five international designers that came up with a concept and

our competition won. Since the government wanted to have a tall building

and say, China can build tall buildings too. They pretty much took our

competition, which was Adrian's design and went all the way on through. So

that was a major project. At the same time, in Hong Kong, you can't say it's

because of a recession or not, but in 1993 they decided they wanted to expand

their convention center which was located on the main island, on the

waterfront. So there was a huge expansion, and they wanted to get it done by

June 30, 1997, when Britain formally handed over Hong Kong to China [July

1, 1997]. And so that was a massive job that we were involved with, and yet

those were jobs that were great jobs to work on. But from a business

standpoint how did we find those? [I] don't know… The SOM reputation and

a little luck.

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Blum: How did you come to participate in the projects?

Korista: They were competitions and probably SOM as a name got us in the door.

They were large-scale projects, and people are concerned about all architects

being able to do large-scale buildings: how tall they are or where they are.

Blum: Was this out of the Chicago office or all the SOM offices?

Korista: This was out of Chicago.

Blum: So did China save SOM from going under?

Korista: No, I doubt that. But the point is that when you have the flexibility and you

have the interest in doing lots of different kinds of projects, then you have the

ability to change as times change. In the middle nineties from probably 1992

to 1998 or 1999 here in Chicago, we did the renovation of six Green Line CTA

[Chicago Transit Authority] stations. We completely tore the stations apart

and put them back together. I had worked earlier in my career on CTA

projects along the Dan Ryan. The first ones where we put stations for CTA

Red Line way back when it first came along in the early seventies, and then

in the mid-eighties it went out to Kennedy, and then later downtown at

Madison and Wells. Then all of a sudden here in 1990s when real estate was

slow, all of a sudden here we come up with this infrastructure-type project

here in Chicago. Redoing the six stations was a good-size project. It was

spread over several years. But again, from a business or architectural

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standpoint you could say we couldn't see that one coming. But it was there.

Certainly we had relationships with various offices of the city of Chicago,

and that helped. So in the Chicago office there was this dichotomy; all of a

sudden we were doing work for the CTA again, which we hadn't done for

twenty years. We were doing Hong Kong expansions––the huge expansion

down on the harbor––but since 1978 we hadn't done anything in Hong Kong,

which was at the end of New World Center project. Then Shanghai, which

was the first shot at China that we were really getting serious about. We

helped them to start to boom. A boom in Shanghai, which has been

boomtown up until now, started with the Jin Mao Tower. So I think the

legacy of SOM is the ability to do a lot of different things, very well. If we had

to do a competition, we were doing it well enough to win, and then we were

able to live up to what we said we'd do and get it done.

Blum: Was there any interest at SOM in historic preservation at that time?

Korista: Certainly. Again, in Chicago, it helped the Chicago office because in the 1990s

we did the restoration of the Chicago Symphony Center, which was in the

period of 1993 to 1997 when we had the formal opening. I think we still keep

working on the CSO. Then we also did the renovation of the Civic Opera

building, which was not so much the seating part itself, but all the back stage

areas. We completely redid the stage and removed a couple of building

columns for the forty-story Civic Opera Theater tower above in order to

make a larger-scaled stage area.

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Blum: Was this to return the Civic Opera house to its former condition? Or was it an

improvement?

Korista: I'd say it was more of an improvement of stage and backstage areas. Now

they certainly went through and refurbished the seats; they refurbished the

gold in-lays on the walls and ceiling.

Blum: And installed the little lights?

Korista: Yes, the lights. Now compared to Symphony Center, where for all practical

purposes we just took all the insides apart and then put it all back together

again, the Civic Opera house was a smaller renovation job.

Blum: Did you achieve the goal of putting it back as it was originally?

Korista: Well, it was closer to the original CSO hall. They expanded some of their

seating, they achieved much better acoustics, they redid the ceiling because

the ceiling was falling down, the stage was completely done and then, of

course, the back building behind the hall was a brand new building. So other

than the front wall of the orchestra hall here, almost everything behind that

was taken apart all the way down to the bare bones and then all put back

together again, to come back to the same high, or even a higher-quality

symphonic hall. The Lyric was more, to me, a functional change that we were

making the backstage area more workable for the kinds of things they

needed to do for today's Lyric. The main seating areas and the lounge areas

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remain the same other than refurbishing things. It wasn't changing all the

things. But when both of those happened, you could ask is that work a kind

of historic preservation? People are interested or people are not, is it

infrastructure or not? Donations and giving went up, because that's how they

funded them. In the same time period we also did the renovation of Ravinia.

We were involved with that. We had all three of those going.

Blum: What was done at Ravinia?

Korista: We redid the small theater they had.

Blum: The Murray Theater?

Korista: Yes, Murray Theater, and then we redid the whole stage––it was more

functional––but it wasn't changing the directions of things. Then small

buildings were also built, and the seating part, where there is seating, that

was refurbished and kind of reshaped.

Blum: In the pavilion?

Korista: In the pavilion, yeah. So we had three of those jobs. Again, are those things

we would expect to be doing? All three at once and were they linked? Sure,

especially in the music community, certainly Ravinia is closely tied to CSO

[Chicago Symphony Orchestra]. Directors, and so forth, are different people

but they kind of tie together. The Lyric was somebody else that says, "Well, if

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you guys can do that, why can't you do ours?" Ardis [Krainik] was quite a

driver as far as promoting the Lyric; she really drove that thing. In 1997 is

when [Daniel] Barenboim was coming in, and I think the CSO had promised

to get a much better hall before he'd start his tenure.

Blum: Oh, is that right?

Korista: And I think that was part of the driving force at the CSO. But those were

darned interesting! You learn a lot more about acoustics than we had; I had

been involved in some smaller renovations, but this was really restoration.

You didn't take it all apart, well, you kind of did, but you kind of didn't. In a

structural sense that's good and sometimes it's a lot harder than doing a new

building, because you have to be much more careful. But again, those fell in

the 1990s. We still had other more normal things to do; we did a lot of

schools, and a lot of tall buildings.

Blum: Are you talking about new buildings?

Korista: It was more of these other things, and they kind of built and built and built.

In New York, their big build in the nineties all of a sudden wasn't so many

new buildings, but they got a very good Interiors group together. So they

were making enormous monies and doing some very nice work doing

interiors mainly in the New York City/Manhattan corporate area. So their

interiors department boomed, way, way up. San Francisco was the only one

that kind of… well, it was always a smaller office. It was never as big as New

203

York or Chicago, whichever one is biggest, and it wasn't working overseas that much. They were the ones that had probably the smallest office, and they were still doing large but singular projects, and not projects all over the place.

That's one of the things with the flexibility and diversity that I think SOM has always had. SOM Chicago probably, I believe, has had the maximum diversity or abilities or talents or just the willingness that "Yes, we can do anything; we can do it very well and you'll get a good product out of it." And you've got to have the diversity to do that, or at least people's interest in doing that. I think that's why we've survived. The nineties are a good example––it was a time in which the projects came, however they came, and we did them very well. Not that I know that much about it, but after World

War II there wasn't much except for industrial work, manufacturing work, and military work. Well, anywhere from Okinawa to doing Oak Ridge down in Tennessee; and a lot of manufacturing buildings. They are not what you would think of as first-line architecture that SOM would necessarily be doing. But it was the business that needed to be done. From 1945 till 1951 or

1952 everybody says, "Oh yeah, everything was booming!" But it wasn't so booming after the war, because all the boom in the war was totally military industry. Then all of a sudden we don't need all those things anymore. There was kind of a slow period in there and SOM did a lot of different types of work. We didn't continue on doing all the nuclear related manufacturing plants in the country. So it's that diversity and being willing to go anywhere in the world and not just say, "Oh it's not in Chicago so I don't want it." And there are still a lot of firms that don't go anywhere. They just want to do it here.

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Blum: What about green architecture? Did SOM think about that in the nineties?

Korista: To me––I think green architecture, a lot of it has to do with what can be

sustained and sustainability has a lot to do with energy, which is mechanical

and electrical engineering. It didn't have much publicity but we always did,

for the client. We always did these mechanical engineering analyses to show

what kind of equipment you can have and how you can cut down on your air

conditioning, if it's a hot climate, with a special type of glass, and so forth. It

was just kind of normal. It didn't get called "sustainability" or "green." So it

was really the nineties, and into 2000 here, where everybody said, push,

push, push on and call it "green". It involved a lot of the things we were

normally doing. We didn't just use clear plate glass if you had to look out the

west window all year long, or not think about shades in buildings before

shades were green. Certainly since people have started talking about it, there

is more interest by owners and clients to say photovoltaic. We did

photovoltaic twenty years ago, to a small extent, but it was always expensive,

and it didn't produce a lot of electricity and people would just say, "I don't

want to spend any more money on that." Now when it's got a new, green

name, the clients may say, "Oh yeah, well, I've got to have photovoltaic, and

I've got to have shaded glass, and I've got to have double wall systems." All

of which do cost more money. Hopefully they are sustainable and are green

because they do save on net energy, or the carbon footprint or whatever you

would like to call it. Many of these things were being done in the past, not

only by SOM but by others. They had other names, okay? It wasn't green, it

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wasn't sustainability––we were just trying to do good buildings, and we

understood that if you could use reflective glass and keep some of the radiant

energy out, then why weren't you doing that? That would cut down on your

mechanical and electrical loads. If you could landscape roof areas, or given a

chance to landscape roof areas or use berms around first floors and still be

able to have the first-floor people friendly; those were just kind of natural

things. They didn't have all this pizzazz of sustainability, which we do now.

There's a good part to that because it's focused more people that every

building should be looking to trying to reduce more, especially energy loads.

Energy loads are a good part of it. If you can sustain yourself in a building

and not have to borrow anything, that would be the epitome. This building

we're doing over in Guangzhou, Pearl River, in China is supposed to be the

closest to a zero-energy building, if they ever build all the systems in it. Zero

energy is easy to say; it's very, very difficult to do. They say that other than

water to the building, then you're not going to take any electricity, and you're

not going to take any gas, and you're going to keep your loads down far

enough so that you're using so little of the electrical loads that you can self-

contain it by generating electricity, photovoltaic or wind turbines in the

building, and so forth. But yeah, the good part about that is it's made people

focus on it. On the other hand, it's not altogether understood unless you take

a very comprehensive view of it, then you will not do things that are simply

costing the client more money and not accomplishing very much.

Blum: Oh, the ideal is to save, not only the environment, but money at the end of

the line.

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Korista: Yes, and that doesn't always necessarily happen because most of these

systems will cost additional first costs against down-stream savings.

Blum: You mentioned Jin Mao building in China. In 1998, at the Museum of

Modern Art in New York there was an exhibition called "Tall Buildings," in

which, and I quote, "Adrian Smith and Stanton Korista designed the

decorative and opulent Jin Mao Tower, to create a unique presence on the

Shanghai skyline that recalls the ancient form of the Chinese pagoda."

Korista: That's true.

Blum: What did the client tell you that they wanted?

Korista: Well, it was a competition that was really the Chinese national government

operating through an entity they set up, which was really a trading company.

It was a competition in which there were five, I believe, five international

architects that offered solutions. They said, this is the first building in

redeveloping the Pudong area of Shanghai, which was kicking off their city's

redevelopment. They wanted a tall building, as tall as could possibly be. It

didn't necessarily have to be the tallest in the world, but they under their

breath said, "Well, get close."

Blum: Why was a tall building special?

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Korista: They were kind of, in the beginning, people saying, "Well, tall buildings put

me on the map." This was China, let alone Shanghai. Shanghai, I'm sure

agreed. The leaders that were in the national government at that time

basically were from Shanghai originally. So there was a very tight connection

between Shanghai and the national government. So it was a competition, but

their purpose was they wanted it to be a very good building. They wanted it

to be done by reputable people that have done some tall buildings. It didn't

have to be the tallest, but a tall building. And they wanted to use an engineer

that was knowledgeable about tall buildings, which kind of cut down the

field fairly quickly.

Blum: What had been your tall buildings up until that time?

Korista: Oh, like Hancock and Sears. They called Jin Mao eighty-eight stories, because

eights are very popular and very lucky in the Chinese culture.

Blum: Was that imbedded into parts of the design?

Korista: Yeah, so there was eight sides, and there was eight main columns, and there

was eight secondary columns. The center core was a concrete octagon which

had eight sides, and the four corners stepped back in eight- or sixteen-story

increments, so there was a lot of lore built into it, and Adrian played on that.

Does that have to be everything? It's obviously not everything, because you

look at most of the other buildings in Shanghai and nobody asks for people

to build, in essence, something that would be China, versus just modern

208 world architecture. So Adrian's thought on it was basically to take a Chinese pagoda, which is similar in context to Japanese pagodas or Korean pagodas.

They all have individual long histories which I'll say I don't totally understand. The idea of the pagodas and the setting back of the roof levels as they go up, and the number of times you set back; it's a function of eights for

Chinese pagodas. It doesn't mean there are only eight setbacks, there can be more, but if you go with eight then I think the next one is sixteen. So in shaping this building, which was also beneficial structurally, he took the four corners and just kept basically setting those back in. The four broad sides are almost vertical, and that was good structural-engineering. These setbacks helped because it gives a very rough and non-uniform surface, which when winds blow on it, the flatter or the more typical each face is, the more difficult to deal with wind loads or the movements of the building. All these setbacks are very, very good for wind engineering. We went in there, and of course they hadn't built any buildings this tall, and their philosophy of their codes were set for thirty-story concrete buildings. This is a lot like Russia, they built thirty-story residential buildings by the millions for the last thirty years in

China, because that's about all they built. They weren't ready for tall buildings, their codes weren't ready for tall buildings. Tall buildings means you have to have deeper foundations, and you have to have different structural systems than they think about. And it went very rapidly. At the competition, they said we want that. Everybody said, "Oh well, they'll pick your scheme then they'll tell you to redesign it."

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Blum: Will you describe the competition process?

Korista: Well, everybody had a relatively short period of time. I think it was two

months from being asked to participate until turning out, basically, an

architectural concept that had ingredients of structural engineering with it.

The client came around and met everyone. This gentleman was from the

central government in Beijing. The government set up a thing called the

Foreign Trade Association, or Institute, and that was the way the government

could control this project. Therefore, they had a chairman of that entity. So he

came here to Chicago and visited us, and we showed him what Adrian was

working on. He said, "Well, just turn it in May 1 and by June 1 I'll tell you

who wins." Nobody believed that because competitions usually don't get

decided upon instantaneously. I can remember we went to Chinatown

because we were trying to take him to some place in Chicago where Shanghai

food is served. Most of Chinatown is Cantonese, they're not Shanghainese. So

we found this place and we went up there and ate on the second floor. It was

a good Chinese meal, and he had a couple of people with him. It turned out

that he was here on the 8th of April, and we started talking about eights. And

when we started talking about eights, we decided we had eight people at the

table. Eight people is the right for a formal Chinese dinner but we didn't

necessarily plan it that way, it just turned out that way.

Blum: Were you aware of this symbolic meaning of eight?

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Korista: Yes, I was, from my Hong Kong days, but it just so happened we started

talking about it and the client looked at his watch and he said, "Well, it's the

eighth of April. And it's 8:00, and it was! He said, "Oh, this is too much. You

guys must win anyway with all these eights." It was happenstance. He didn't

have to come on the 8th of April, he just did. We were going to have dinner at

8:00, we just did! We started talking about there's eight people around this

table which is the normal for a Chinese formal dinner, and this wasn't formal,

it was just kind of an informal dinner. It was good Shanghainese food, so he

liked that. But all these eights… so we always said, Well, eights are good. But

they wanted an eighty-eight story building. Deng Xiaoping was still the

premier, he was kind of the old guy but he was pushing new aggressive

economics. He was probably the last of the old, old guard. He was somebody

that actually was with Mao, and he was quite old. I think he was eighty-eight

years old! No, this is right! They were trying to pick the person for this

building, and the building had to be eighty-eight stories. Actually Jin Mao

was eighty-eight stories.

Blum: Who decided that, the client?

Korista: Yeah, they wanted eighty-eight stories.

Blum: Was that because of eight being so symbolic?

Korista: Yes, yes. This premier was like eighty-eight years old in 1993, so they wanted

to get it picked before he was going to leave, or die, or whatever it was,

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which he did after they picked the winner. So it was a gift to him for being

eighty-eight years old, and they got this eighty-eight story building. He got to

actually see the models, and so forth, because he left government and he died

fairly quickly. But he was kind of the "father" really pushing China to

modernize. So he was kind of the pusher. He was only premier for ten years

or something like that. But all these pieces came together. Actually the

building is about 102 levels, but once you get to eighty-eight, they just quit

calling it anything.

Blum: No, really?

Korista: No, really, honestly, yes. They wouldn't call it anything other than eighty-

eight. The main observatory is on the eighty-eighth floor. And so they had a

program, but just a slight program. Pudong was an area; it's right downtown

in Shanghai, but it was just kind of a farming community. When we first

went over to look at it, we said, "You're going to build that building here?"

And they said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, what about all those people?" They said,

well, we just ask them to come one night and say, "Well, you're going to

move," and they get moved to some where else, which they did. It was a long

but short process, but we had to go through the government, and the

planning of the government, and then the engineers of Shanghai, and then

the national engineers. The structural engineering must have had, they call

them expert meetings, in which they bring people from all over the country,

throw them at you and they'd ask you questions. Well, mechanical, electrical,

plumbing, they kind of figured, okay, as long as you use the right fuels that

212 we have available. Okay. Structural engineering, because it was a tall building, they just were after me and after me and after me. We probably had, I had twenty-five meetings. I only went over there about twenty times, but sometimes you get two or three expert meetings in a week. They'd come in and grill you about this and about that, and why can't we fit the code exactly, and then you explain that. So Jin Mao really was a structural exercise for all of China in believing how tall buildings differ from thirty-story buildings. Seismic is a problem over there. All their codes were designed for seismic effects on buildings, which because they're short and made of concrete, probably they don't move very much. This is not good for seismic because they weigh a lot; they have a short period so they generate a lot more seismic forces. You get a taller and taller building, and it's like––just think of a noodle or something waving in the air. Well, the taller it is, the more it's just going to be loose. So if you shake the bottom of it, it'll take its time getting up to the top. If you have a little short building and you shake the bottom of it like in an earthquake, the top of it's going to go right away. But just getting through that and the fact that wind and hurricanes, which they have, they get the typhoons because Shanghai is on the sea, going through all these things was tedious. The tower itself, was complicated to coordinate, since it was multi-purpose. We had a Grand Hyatt Hotel on the top and offices throughout. We had a side specialty building plus a big deep excavation hole, and the ground water's high––all the complications of below-grade construction––so we had to pioneer a new foundation system. It was constantly convincing people we wanted to use higher-strength concrete.

They could do it, but they hadn't done it before. So the concrete suppliers

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would say, "Well, we can do it." But then you had to go convince the

government, and the government would say, "Well, we never did that before.

Don't do that." Because China is very much like China was, it's not that the

engineers or contractors were dumb, but they're much more controlled. I

could come over there and say anything I wanted to and nobody's going to

throw me in jail the next day. If they said, "No, we don't believe the code,

we're just not going to follow it." They could wind up out of a job and in jail,

because the government at that time, and still pretty much, literally controls

everybody, where they're working and what they're making. So they would

also use us, or use me, to get new ideas going, because I wasn't so

constrained. They weren't about to toss me in jail because I said, no, we

shouldn't be using the code, we should be doing this. That was quite an

interesting sidelight other than it's a fantastic building.

Blum: It sounds like you had to deal with a big bureaucracy.

Korista: It was. It is. Any society like that which is just barely coming out of

Communism is very bureaucratic. The guys up here set the rules and that's it.

The rules are good or they're not good, whether that's an economic rule,

cultural rule, engineering rule, or architectural rule. With structural

engineering, they understood that the code was important because they've

had lots of earthquakes, and they get buildings that collapse. All of a sudden

Stan and SOM and Adrian are coming there to build this big building saying,

"We've done big buildings before, and this is how you should do it." And

they're saying, uhhhhh. So, I mean, the structural engineering part of Jin Mao

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was kind of an interesting path because you had to educate, and fend off. It

wasn't educate because they were dumb, it was just they hadn't done it

before, kind of getting past the first hurdle. And I thought it was great. It

kept you on your toes, and of course the translation was always back and

forth. A lot of them understood English; very few of them spoke English, so

we drew a lot of pictures. This was at the beginning when it was still not all

PCs and PowerPoint presentations. They still weren't all there. We're still

back with the old slide projectors or sketching on a paper with a pencil,

which did get you a long way. Wind tunnels? They had a couple at

universities, but they hadn't been used very much.

Blum: You mean to test…

Korista: To test tall buildings, wind is very important on tall buildings. So we had

people in Canada working with us doing the wind tunnel testing. They had

to believe that those people knew what they were doing, and of course they

did. But it was all the things, if you're doing something new, and engineering

or structural engineering of a tall building is certainly something new until

you've done it a couple of times. You had to have confidence that you've

found out what is the critical issue. Part of their confidence-building was just

finding out what the critical things were, and then in believing you, and then

standing up to the newer ranks without you, saying, "Yeah, okay, we think

they're about right and we should go ahead and try this." Now since we got

Jin Mao built, they've had some heavy winds over there, a couple of

typhoons that came right through Shanghai. They've tried to make

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measurements of the building, and reported obnoxious movements in the

building. On the other hand, the hotel residents didn't even leave, and they're

all at the top of the building, so that will tell you that whatever the

measurement was, it was just not true. It was just how they're measuring.

They actually did, after the building was built, they did their own wind

tunnel testing, twice.

Blum: After the building was built? What was the point of that?

Korista: Well, they didn't tell us that; they just went ahead and did it because they

were so concerned.

Blum: Were they testing your tests?

Korista: This is a tall building, and gee whiz––after it's built… But they were at least

interested in the behavior, and they're still working on it. They just engaged

another one of the wind tunnel firms in Canada, RWDI, to do a new wind

environment study for Shanghai, which is studying wind records and then

coming up with variations in the code. So they finally have just proved, now

in 2009, I guess the report was just released in the last month of 2009, what

actually is the Shanghai wind climate. At the time we had to follow the old

Chinese code and that didn't fit everything. We also followed the U.S. code

and then our own good philosophy of good engineering for structural

engineering. Now after fifteen years, they proved to themselves that what we

did on Jin Mao––because they kind of used our Jin Mao criteria for other new

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tall buildings––was not wrong and all these other new buildings were not

wrong. They weren't or we wouldn't have been doing it. So really, for China–

–and it's been since Jin Mao started, which was built between 1994 and 1998–

–they've built probably a hundred buildings in China that are as tall as the

John Hancock building or taller. Jin Mao was kind of the lynchpin for all of

them. So from that aspect it was great, and being part of a good job and

working with Adrian all through it. That was really the first tall high-rise that

he ever worked on.

Blum: How did Adrian and you arrive at the pagoda form?

Korista: I'll say that the idea of pagoda was Adrian's, from him looking at pagodas

and thinking, Well, gee, why couldn't I architecturally present this in a

building. As far as structural engineering…

Blum: He used the form of a pagoda?

Korista: The form. Looking at a pagoda, a real pagoda––you were talking once

before––Adrian went out and photographed things. Well, he went to China

and photographed a whole bunch of pagodas.

Blum: Ah, he did!

Korista: Yeah, Chinese pagodas. Now in China the pagodas aren't as numerous as in

Japan. In Japan you have a pagoda every other block that you turn no matter

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where you go in the country. He did those things and said, "Well, why not

have a stepped back building like this?"

Blum: What's the function of a pagoda in China?

Korista: I've always thought the basis is religious, but it also can be just a gathering

place and a meditating place that's not just religious-oriented.

Blum: Is it a burial place?

Korista: No, not usually. There may be, but it's not usual. It's a place of meditation,

and we'll have to say that their religions are significantly different from ours,

but it has some religious significance to it. I think they were just interested in

the shape, that it responded to China. Because it was the first tall building

that people recognized as China, not just a square box with glass on the

outside of it. Oh, they did that in the United States. So Adrian came up with

that, and actually it was a good marriage to begin with. We had a lot of

discussions on how we could put it together.

Blum: To blend aspects of Chinese culture with some things from new technology?

Korista: I think that's what he wanted to do from the beginning. There was a lot of

discussion on technology. His massing was wonderful. We knew there were

very strong winds, and winds would control the structural design of the

building. So his idea of having these setbacks and changes in cross-sectional

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floorplate was great for control of wind-induced behavior so there was no

dichotomy between his initial concept architecturally and a good structure.

The massing of the structure in tall buildings is the most important thing.

There may be variations on what kind of structure you put inside of it, but

the massing is the thing. That's why we had to work so closely together, on

Jin Mao and other things like Trump. Trump was a little bit more functional.

In Burj Dubai, the massing makes this ultra-tall structure possible, because if

you get the wrong massing, you can never control the wind; and if you can't

control the wind, you're all through. So there was a feeling of sympathy of

architecture and structural engineering from his first concept. This was not a

complicated building of clashing about massing versus structure, which

some buildings are. This was very, very compatible to begin with.

Blum: Can you explain the core mast ideas?

Korista: Well, we have a system which Bill Baker, I think, coined the word, which was

called a "stayed mast." It's like a sailboat mast where you have your

guidelines coming down, and really the forces of wind are transmitted to the

boat, so you move. The forces are through the sail, through cables, and the

cables basically go around the jib and then come down to the boat. So the

forces to get the boat to move is not just the sail, because if you didn't connect

to the boat, it still wouldn't go anywhere. Well, in a structure, in similar

ways, you've got to be able to control the wind and the wind loads. So rather

than having very closely spaced exterior columns like Sears, which is a

framed tube; or where you can certainly see all of the structure like

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Brunswick; or big diagonals on the outside, like John Hancock where you can see all of the structure, we have evolved in the last ten years with architects saying well, they'd like not to be so structuralist. So we returned to having architectural representations on the outside and the structure fits within.

That's been going on for a while. We got away from the total structuralist concept. Now some buildings will look like what a TV tower would look like.

You could see the structure and it'll always be the structure. I'm sure there are some buildings that'll have diagonals that you can always see, to read it.

But this building was, I mean his idea was he didn't want to do a structuralist building even though it was tall. You don't see the primary structure. What you see is the cladding, and the setbacks, and you can't tell what the structure is. So with this idea, you have all the elevators and stairs and mechanical systems that must go up and down the building. And there's a lot of those for a tall building because tallness just means you have more elevators and more stairs and more mechanical works that go up and down. This results in a central core which usually if it's out of concrete, for a tall building, that's good; concrete is usually cheaper and you can build it faster than a steel framing around the outside. Basically what it does––you have a core element, the structural element which is like a vertical post, and then basically at certain levels, which were the mechanical floors, we have what we call outrigger trusses, which are horizontal arms that go out to the exterior. These arms are out there connecting to what we call mega-columns, which are just exterior vertical columns that are big, and they hang onto the outrigger arms.

Let's say you're only this big when the wind is pushing on you; at those outrigger floors, you're much bigger. So when you push, Bill does it better

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than I do, but if you're standing there and somebody's pushing on you, then

you sway horizontally. Now if I stretch my arms out, and I can hang onto

something out here, now you push me, I can't lean that way as far.

Blum: The load's off balance.

Korista: Now if I can do that in two directions, then it's just like the wind pushes on

the building and you grab the outside. So instead of you just pushing me,

which is all I can do, I can move however much weight I have down there.

I'm grabbing hold of the whole building weight at the outside and pushing it

and pulling it. So that's what defines the building's structural concept. It's got

a center core with these outriggers, and then the outside columns are just

there as gravity columns carrying the floor loads. Basically that's why the

corners could be easily eroded back in the building. It was not the first time

that technique has ever been used; it was probably the first time it has been

used for that tall a building. It was certainly all different for the Chinese, so it

took a lot of time explaining it to them, but it's behaved very well.

Blum: How was it working with people who didn't speak your language and you

didn't speak theirs? You said you did a lot of drawing.

Korista: Drawing, yes. The old Chinese proverb, a picture's worth ten thousand

words, is true. It simply is true. A lot of things they would understand,

numbers are numbers. Although there are Chinese numbers, virtually

everyone, including the workmen in the field could read metric numbers. So

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for the words they couldn’t understand we actually made our SOM

construction drawings, such that all the words on the drawings were both in

English and Chinese, which is the first time we tried that.

Blum: Did that work?

Korista: It worked generally. Sometimes we wouldn't translate it right, and

sometimes we'd come up with a translation and they would just kind of

laugh at its meaning. Mandarin is the main Chinese dialect for the whole

country, it's the national language. You also have a lot of second-tier

languages that read more or less the same, but yet their verbal meanings

differ. So there's Cantonese, there's Shanghainese amongst many others.

People that live in Shanghai actually speak Shanghainese. Cantonese is

spoken in Hong Kong. They always were kind of separated from Beijing, so

Cantonese-speaking people had a hard time when the central government in

China took over Hong Kong and said, Well, everybody's got to know

Mandarin because that's the national language. So we definitely had a

problem with the people in Shanghainese. Most Chinese that are in the

United States, including the engineers we'd have, came probably from Hong

Kong and Canton. Now it's getting more mixed, but they came from Hong

Kong so they spoke Cantonese, which is not Mandarin. We had to have

drawings per the government requirement of Mandarin, and is certainly not

Shanghainese. So we'd translate some words into Mandarin, and in

Shanghainese it didn't mean much of anything. But the numbers were there,

the lines were there, even the workmen in the field that couldn't speak or

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understand English, they understood the language of numbers, and they

could understand the drawings, so it wasn't so bad.

Blum: What was the quality of the workmanship?

Korista: Actually we were concerned about that, and our client actually got different

international contractors to bid on it, although I think politically we always

knew that it was going to be the largest Shanghai contractor. So it was, but

they were very good.

Blum: What was their name?

Korista: Shanghai Construction Group, SCG, which were very good. Overall I'd have

to say the quality of the construction was good. They accomplished things in

different ways than we might have, but they used our drawings, especially

our structural and architectural drawings. The architectural cladding system

was done by a German firm that does good work.

Blum: Couldn't SOM have done that?

Korista: No, this is the actual construction. We did the design drawings but the actual

construction was done by the Chinese.

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[Tape 5: Side A]

Blum: You were saying that Chinese workmen worked on the project. Jin Mao was

a project with Adrian. He has the reputation for putting things in context.

How was it possible to put Jin Mao in context, because the site was just open

and, I assume, leveled. Did you say this was farmland?

Korista: There was actually what we would call small farmland. So it was the first

building that was done in the area called Pudong New Town. The

government decided they were going to bring Shanghai into the twentieth

century. They had a lot of history to the west of the Huangpu River, which is

where all the development came when Shanghai was divided by seven

foreign countries in the drug wars of the 1890s, or some date like that. So on

the west side of the river was the main old city of Shanghai. It had all kinds

of architecture. The older buildings along the Bund on the west side of the

river were represented mostly by British architecture of 1900-1910 buildings.

Jin Mao was decided on by the government, the first building to be built in

the Pudong Redevelopment Area, located just east of the Huangpu River.

The architectural context has to be described. Part of the brief for the

competition stated it was going to be an eighty-eight story tall building that

was sympathetic to China and Chinese architecture. I forget what the exact

words were. But it was to illustrate modernism, not so much in its

architecture, but modern materials that China could work with. It was to be

not only a tall building but it had to have the right kind of façade materials.

So it certainly wasn't to be in context of all of the eight- and ten-story

buildings that were built in the early 1900s, which were most of what would

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be called the city of Shanghai. The rest of central Shanghai was simply

buildings that had been built just for housing that were brick masonry and

wood of various categories which every now and then there'd be something

that would be interesting architecturally, but not any kind of modern

architecture or western architecture. So Adrian was being asked to do

something that wasn't going to be singular because we knew that two other

tall buildings were going to be built next to it per the approved Pudong

master plan; one of them is built now, the World Financial Center. He had to

work within those parameters. It wasn't to create something that fits into the

existing city of Shanghai. This was to be the launch point of a new modern

city of Shanghai. If you look at the Pudong area now, in 2009, there's been

probably a hundred, forty-story buildings that have been built within two

miles of the Jin Mao site. Now you would say, well, yeah, it probably shows

that Jin Mao was the lead building fueling this redevelopment. But all of

these other new modern buildings are some form of modern architecture,

modern materials, and still Jin Mao stands out with its configuration, its skin

that is stainless, and certainly its Chinese pagoda-like character.

Blum: But it had to wait until other buildings were built to provide a context.

Korista: So it is contextual as the forerunner of the new Shanghai. The Chinese had

stated that, "well, we don't want it really to fit in, we want something new."

Blum: To stand out?

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Korista: That changes the name of things. We're kind of in that era right now.

Probably from 1995 on, all over the world many of the new places being

developed don't have anything to fit in with. Like Dubai has nothing. Ten

years ago, it had zero other than two-story villas. They all say they want

something new and modern. So when you go there today and you see all of

this new development, we would say it is some kind of modern vocabulary

of architecture. There is no context to the existing or historical past. Now

maybe ten years from now when somebody wants to build a new building,

they'll say, Well, it should be in some context with the city of Dubai. So in a

lot of these new cities being developed, they start with no firm contextual

relationship. In cities that have been around for a while in the U.S. and in

Europe, there's much more contextual definition. There will be some

similarity, using modern architectural techniques, and the resulting new

building will have some degree of context with what's there already.

Blum: Jin Mao had a little moat. The tower was separated from the plaza by a moat,

and there was a moon gate on each base and a flying carpet over the

entrance. Will you explain this design?

Korista: The moon gate was an entry. The carpet was more announcing, in a different

way, the fact that there was a very special hotel that's at the top of this tower.

It also had to do with Chinese identity interests. They would kind of describe

something, and Adrian would interpret his version of their interest. Flying

carpets do mean something as far as welcome, and visiting and staying.

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Blum: In the Chinese context?

Korista: Yeah, and for the moon gate we hear of the Chinese celebrating the spring

festival, it's really the moon festival, new moon festival. So the moon gate is

the symbology of a new moon that is good. That's a festival-ish type of thing.

Even the words "Jin Mao" are basically translated into gold. If you translated

it in English it'd be the "gold tower" or something like that. The fact that the

word Mao again shows that there's a lot of play on things that are done

because of the Chinese symbology behind it.

Blum: How embedded did you become, or did Adrian become, in Chinese

symbolism, the culture. Was it a big feature of the project?

Korista: You know, it's always interesting. You can say it's a big feature. We were

very interested to begin with, because I had worked on several projects in

Hong Kong where we actually physically moved buildings because of feng

shui.

Blum: You moved buildings?

Korista: Moved buildings and had to move columns after the building was half built

when we were doing the New World Centre project in Hong Kong, because

of feng shui, which is a blending of life and after-life, nature and all into

compatible things in the world. Not that I can explain it very well but, it is

the symbolic part of Chinese culture. When we first went to Shanghai we

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asked if feng shui is going to be serious. And of course the answer we got

was, no, no, that's just our friends in the southeast of China. So our client

said, "No, feng shui is not really important here for buildings." For buildings,

feng shui has a lot to do with what it looks like, which way is it turned

compared to the sun or the moon, and so forth. And our client said, "Well, it's

not important." Yet they came up with things like the moon is a welcoming

sign, or the symbology of new moon and flying carpets, and so forth. There's

not a lot of that but it does get introduced in there. Now if you look into some

of the interior work that they did inside the tower, which we weren't that

much involved with. But for some of the things that the Grand Hyatt did in

their spaces there's a lot of it. As far as colors go, there's a lot of Chinese

symbology in that of good things and bright colors and Chinese things. Well,

to me they're abstract, but they are important to the Chinese.

Blum: You mentioned the symbolism of red and gold before.

Korista: Red and gold. There's a lot of red and gold in China. When we had the

topping out ceremony, everybody's badges were red and gold, and you got

red and gold flowers. The last steel beam which was part of the steel spire at

the top of the tower was red and gold that everybody got to sign with a gold

pen. So they certainly got their red and gold in. Again, it's symbology; they

weren't looking for a gold building, but gold to them indicated that it was

going to be a good building and would be known all over the world. It was

going to attract a lot more attention to Shanghai and to

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China; and all of that was gold. Now you could say Was that gold with

financial meaning? Or gold color? In part it meant gold financially, sure.

Blum: Do I understand correctly that there was an atrium in this building on the

upper floors but not on the lower floors?

Korista: There was a central open atrium in the upper Hyatt zone of the building. We

basically had an octagonal core in the lower one-half of the tower.

Blum: Eight sided?

Korista: Eight-sided core. It occurred up to the Grand Hyatt Hotel floors which was

about halfway up the building. Hyatt, in many of their buildings––today they

probably have changed their mind but in many of their buildings in the U.S.–

–when they did Grand Hyatts, they used an open central atrium, so

everybody's room was on a balcony around this atrium and you had

interesting things up here and interesting things down there. Of course, a lot

of times people thought they would get seasick or height-sick from looking

up and down. So an open atrium was built in the center. We formulated an

atrium compatible with the core below. Now for the interiors of the Hyatt

Hotel, there were other architectural designers that worked directly for

Hyatt. The outside walls of the octagonal core continue to go up. The hotel

elevators move to the outside of the core rather than being inside the core,

except for one bank which became glass elevators that go all the way up in

the atrium. So as you go into the atrium you can look around at all the sides.

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Basically the hotel rooms are around the outside, and along the inside you

walk along a corridor that goes around the atrium; it's a forty-five story

atrium that goes up and down, and actually the center of the atrium goes all

the way up into the spire. So you can actually get daylight from the spire, all

the way down to the base level of the atrium. There's been a lot of what I

think is fantastic photography of that atrium, and the space turned out to be

something that visually I don't think everybody really thought it was going

to be so interesting. It usually looks almost like a spiral shape. It's not really

spirals, it's just a series of concentric circles, but the way in which they did

the balconies, or the walkways in front of the rooms, did create a spiral

because some balconies extended out slightly further out. In Chicago right

now, Jeanne Gang's "wave building" [Aqua Tower] where the exterior edges

off the slabs move in and out with respect to the outside glass wall that looks

like it's actually waving, but it's just a horizontal building. Well, Hyatt atrium

balconies kind of had a similar effect. There has been a lot of spectacular

photography––forget about architecture––people have taken thousands of

pictures of this atrium. So the atrium was compatible with the building; it

wasn't a forced fit. We didn't need to have all the inside of the lower core go

all the way up the building. The outside ring of the concrete core could go all

the way up, and your room came up to that wall, we had openings through

the wall, and then this balcony just cantilevered out over the edge, from the

wall into the atrium.

Blum: Let me just read what the curator of MOMA said about the building, he said,

"The most interesting is the sectional inversion at the top floor, where the

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program shifts to a hotel and the shaft of the core is void with a balcony," as

you've been describing, "facing into a huge atrium." He thought that was the

most interesting part of the building.

Korista: Certainly within the interior that's true. There's some very nice restaurants up

on top of the building. There's an observatory on the eighty-eighth floor,

which is very popular in Shanghai and does a lot of business. They've done

very nicely––the structure actually penetrates through both the observatory

and the restaurants. The interiors have been done very, very well. It is a very

rich space, but yet you know that this must be some kind of special building

because you see diagonal things that go through the space. So that worked

out well; it worked out and I think everybody was happy on the interior

portion of it. People were worried about the volumes of space in the building

because the hotel only needed a certain amount of floor area which was

much smaller than the office floors below, so there was the atrium. Of course

it cost money to build even an atrium, but I think it's been very, very

beneficial. Up until now, Grand Hyatt since it opened, which was I think in

1998, has been very successful and they always point to Jin Mao and say

"Give us, if we do another one together, do one like that," because it's been

100 percent full for ten years.

Blum: Was there any thought, in designing this building, about future expansion?

Korista: No, it was this eighty-eight story building, although as I said it's actually 102

levels but they just quit counting at eighty-eight, and things above it are

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called penthouses, and things like that. No, because it was part of a master

plan which had the three tall towers; Jin Mao was going to be the first, with a

large park area at the base. It was going to be the first thing that signified this

large redevelopment of Pudong. There was to be one next to it, which has

now been completed in this last year 2008, the World Financial Center, and

then there's a third one that will even be taller than those two. We knew

going in, by the master plan that this was the Shanghai and federal

government master plan; Jin Mao would not be the highest, but it would be

the first in China to be high. So now, ten years later, literally the World

Financial Center has been completed and is just slightly higher. It's a

completely different appearing building. It looks more modernistic, but it fits

into now what has been built up around it, in lower buildings. The third

tower is going to be, probably we would say, even more in tune with today's

new modernism. However, how soon that will be built in today's economic

climate, is anyone's guess.

Blum: Are these SOM jobs?

Korista: No, no. We knew when going in that if we won the Jin Mao competition, we

could only do the first one because they wanted to have three different

architects. Period. That was known going in. So we think we were very

successful. When it was finally topped out in 1987, Jin Mao was the tallest

building in China, the fourth tallest building in the world. It went to the third

tallest when we had 9/11, because the ones in between disappeared.

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Blum: Well, there was another tall building that you worked on right here in

Chicago; that is Trump Tower.

Korista: Trump Tower, which actually was almost, as far as Adrian was concerned, a

follow-on. We started working on that beginning in about 1999, so Jin Mao

was basically done in about 1998. In the beginning of Trump Tower, Donald

Trump came in looking for Adrian. He wanted him to do the tallest building

in the world, and obviously knew that we had the structural engineering

capabilities to do that. He wanted to have the tallest building in the world,

not just another tall building.

Blum: And he wanted Adrian to do it?

Korista: And he wanted Adrian to do it. Exactly what that linkage is, I don't know,

but for the architects doing his buildings, it seems they have no pre-ordained

thoughts. So it's like he never goes back to the same architect twice. But his

interest was to go 2000-feet tall, which would have been the tallest tower at

that point in time. We had actually, in the late nineties, looked at one here in

Chicago for a different group. We knew it as 7 North Dearborn, which site is

now filled with another new building, but it was going to be 2000-feet high

with spires up at the top. At that time everybody was worried about HDTV

and their required 2000-feet height, but that just didn't get off the ground. It

just never got started.

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Blum: What motivates or produces the desire to have the tallest building in the

world? What is that all about?

Korista: I think it's always been a matter of ego, because they cost a lot of money, so it

is driven by ego and symbolism. Not so much architectural symbolism but

the client saying, it's me. As we see around the world today every major city

in the world is striving to get at least one ultra-tall building, if not multiple

tall buildings and to say, "Look, I have a tall building. That means that I'm in

the mainstream." That's why in Seoul, Korea, we've done multiple buildings

there but it doesn't have a super tall one. We now have one designed that's

super tall and we're struggling with trying to get it constructed. Super tall,

about the height of Sears. The Seoul tower is a little bit taller than Sears.

They're talking about some others, but they don't have one yet. Well not only

for SOM but for other architects, they have several other ultra-tall towers that

are kind of on line. And Tokyo doesn't have a super tall building yet. I'm just

picking on some places that don't have really tall buildings yet. London

keeps trying to inch forward, but a very tall building in London is totally out

of context because a forty- or fifty-story building in London looks like the

Sears Tower anywhere else.

Blum: Oh, because it's low-rise?

Korista: Because it's low, the context is low, but they all want tallness. Moscow just

keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, so it can have one. You take every

major area in the world, all the big cities in India, Mumbai is, I'm sure, the

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first one that's going to have it. Now they're having a push to try to get one

built somehow.

Blum: Were you and Adrian disappointed when the floors were reduced on Trump

Tower?

Korista: Well, we were, obviously we were. You can't say that we weren't interested

in the tallest building, because when you love building things––at least part

of what I was doing was tall buildings––and why not be involved with the

next tallest one. I had the opportunity to work on Hancock, which was the

tallest for a little while, and then Sears, which was taller than the World

Trade Center. And then things kind of shut down for almost thirty years, and

Jin Mao was the next one that was actually built that was that tall. In Kuala

Lumpur, the Petronas Towers was being built at about the same point in

time. There is a special art to the architecture and the structural engineering

of tall towers. Many people say, okay, you want a hundred story building?

It's the same as taking three thirty-story buildings and just stacking them up.

From a methodology of not just architectural aesthetics, but of building

function and the structural systems, many believe it's just a thirty-story

building, do it three times. But it's not that at all. Parameters change. So sure

we were interested in doing a tall building, but what really transpired was

that we had several schemes that were viable, 2000 foot-tall schemes, and had

started pricing them between 1999 and 2001. Surprise or not, we had our first

meeting with Donald Trump and his team, in the summer of 2001 and he

said, "Well, I'm ready to go." The first meeting with all of his team in Chicago,

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and probably the first time he came to Chicago, because he likes to stay in

New York and you go to him. It turned out to be on September 11, 2001.

Blum: The day of the attack?

Korista: The day of. We walked in, and he does start meetings early, so we walked in

about 7:30a.m. Chicago time at the SOM office here in Chicago. Somebody

came in about 8:00 and said, "A plane ran into the World Trade Center." So

we got some TVs in the office, and we turned it on, and by the time

everybody just said, "Oh, geez, that's not too good." And Trump was trying

to make calls, and of course you couldn't call New York at all, even at that

time. And it wasn't too long before the second tower was hit, and it became

obvious that it was not just a random thing, it was terrorism. It wasn't too

long after that that the first tower collapsed. Well, even before the first tower

collapsed, after the second plane hit, this very flamboyant personality was

obviously stunned.

Blum: What did he do or say?

Korista: He just said, "Okay, I'm still going to build a tall building, but it can't be any

taller than… I don't even want a building as tall as Sears Tower. I just want a

building like the Hancock." So the whole design was redone, and his only

reasoning for that was he felt that if these things would continue, he would

become a target.

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Blum: What are the special engineering challenges in doing a tall building as

opposed to an ordinary size building.

Korista: Well, the taller the building becomes, the more motion there is and occupants

have perception of it as the building moves, when wind blows on it or there

is an earthquake. In Chicago we don't have earthquakes, so it's really winds.

The wind, depending upon the shape of the building, the massing of the

building, will constantly be moving the building around. The speed at which

it moves in one direction may not be just back and forth… Buildings move in

kind of an oval, really, because the wind never blows exactly only on one

face. So you're constantly trying to reduce the effects of the wind, which are

called the aerodynamic effects. So if you have taller buildings, it's good,

because the period of the building, or how long it takes to move from one

side back to the other side, is longer. You don't perceive as easily the

acceleration of the building; acceleration is just like cars, is how fast

something moves ahead. Okay, velocity, the speed of your car is in miles per

hour, and acceleration is how long it takes to get you to x miles per hour.

Well, the acceleration is much shorter time in a car, but it depends on what

we call the acceleration, which is how fast it moves in these different

directions. So usually the wind is being controlled, not by the strength of the

building, but by trying to get the behavior of the structure to give you

acceptable motion behavior so people don't feel disturbed when they're

moving. Some people that have very acute sense because it's all within your

ear system, which balances most people's whole life. I mean, your eyes do

something, but mostly it's your ear, as pressures change, it tells you that

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you're moving; or if you're in motion how fast you are speeding up or

slowing down. It's all the systems in your ear, in the little sacs of fluid that

actually balance your system.

Blum: Do people sense the motion?

Korista: Yes, the swaying or change in motion or direction of motion. Okay, I mean

even people that are deaf still have these systems in their ears, as far as

balance goes. So it's really getting the building to behave at a realistic point so

that most people will not perceive these motions. It makes a difference if

you're in an office building, since you're there only part of the day. So it's

your perception of motion. Perception is also time dependent if you keep

moving back and forth very rapidly and you do it for an hour, everybody's

going to perceive that motion. But usually winds don't happen in the same

direction for an hour; they happen in bursts because wind is turbulent. Just

like here in Chicago, you get a burst of wind in your face and then you might

get another burst, but it's kind of from a different direction. We're talking

about minutes or seconds of movements and accelerations, so you try to get

the building's behavior to where most of the people will not feel the motion.

So an office building where you're only there part of the time, you might feel

it, but then you don't perceive it because the next three hours you don't feel

anything. If you're in a hotel or residential building, you tend to be there,

especially residential, for longer periods of time. Your mind can remember,

okay, one microsecond ago I really felt something and then gee whiz, I

haven't felt anything for the next three hours. Whereas when you're staying

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there for longer periods, your mind can say, I felt that, and then yesterday I

felt that, and then last night I felt that. And it kind of gets it together. When it

brings it together, even though physically you're not moving that much, your

mind will tell you, yeah, you can sense that. I can tell it's moving now.

Blum: How is the Trump building arranged, are there offices, a hotel, and

condominiums?

Korista: Trump Tower is a mixed-use building. Trump started out that way with

offices, a service hotel and then condominiums. It wound up that the offices

were deleted because the office market wasn't there. They put in some more

parking, then they increased the size of the service hotel, which is, you and I

would call it a hotel. But it's really like you buy a small condominium and

you allow the Trump management chain to operate it like a hotel. So if you're

not there and it's okay with you, they'll actually rent it out. They manage it

and provide services. If you're there, they'll provide you with the same

services if you want to. The majority of the tower is condominiums, regular

condominiums that are purchased.

Blum: And is that where you'd feel the most sway?

Korista: Well, at the top of the building you'd feel the most acceleration. Buildings

generally will sway like that. Usually the top is going to sway the most, but

the accelerations are also probably going to be the strongest at the top,

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because if you took a stick and let it go, the top part of it's going to move

much faster than the rest of it.

Blum: Adrian has said that on his projects he consults with the engineer very soon

after the commission is received. When were you called in?

Korista: He's right to begin with the first meeting; we were there. The same way with

Shanghai; the first meeting we were there. I mean, depending upon the

project, all architects would say, why so early? Some architects learn that for

a building that needs to have a significant structure, whether the structure is

exposed or not, you'd be smart to have a good structural engineer there right

away.

Blum: Right from the beginning?

Korista: If you're building a school building then you could say, Well, why do I need

a structural engineer right away? Even though you do. For tall buildings, yes

you do, and I think Adrian believes in that. Even since Adrian has left SOM,

he's worked with other engineers now, and basically he has a structural

engineer working with him soon on.

Blum: So what changes did Trump make after 9/11?

Korista: So the Trump Tower reduced down.

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Blum: What was Donald Trump like to work with?

Korista: Donald was a very fascinating individual. It's probably what you perceive on

TV. He's a very, well, there's his way and there's his way. He operates on the

basis of generating a lot of publicity or interest. He's certainly a good

developer; he has big ideas but most of his big ideas, sometimes run into, or

many of them run into financial problems somewhere. But certainly as far as

a promoter goes, he's top end. As far as working with him, he has a very,

very small organization.

Blum: He does! I don't know why that surprises me.

Korista: They don't necessarily always do the full buildings. There's a lot of times he's

just helping finance projects. He's lending his name. Generally, he's just

lending his name and some financing, so he's not really development. He

doesn't have a full-time team there that goes all the way through all the

concrete and facades and so forth as you go up the building.

Blum: Well, the Trump building received a lot of press when he hired someone

from one of the shows on television, "The Apprentice." The man's name was

Bill Rancic. He wasn't an architect. So what did he add to the mix?

Korista: That was just publicity. He was never involved in the project. He came to one

project meeting and that was all. Trump used him to probably generate a

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little enthusiasm for his new project, but he was not involved. That's no

secret. You could ask the Trump people.

Blum: What was it like dealing with city hall?

Korista: Well, it was a difficult project, and we had to get a change in plan approval

for it. It was located on the old Sun-Times site. It's a very great challenge

because it's located directly on the Chicago River on the north bank. So you're

getting spectacular tower views out toward the lake from more than one face

of it, because the tower is kind of be inclined along the curve in the river. The

site was interesting geometrically, to fit a tower on the site. Of course they

wanted to build as much space as they could build. A lot of the property

rights were down below. Sun-Times had gotten grants. A lot of time was

spent on this in the planning phase, just in the legal area, because there were

plots of land that Abraham Lincoln––who's 200 years old today––had been

the lawyer for. Various people owned properties because back in those days

they were just what we'd call city lots. Most of it was used for shipping, but it

was still surveyed into small lots. A lot of those things had never been

actually deeded out of the original deed. They had just been passed on or

rented. So just trying to get what belonged to the Sun-Times and of course

that's right where North Wabash Street is a double-deck street on the north

side for the first few blocks going north. So the city had a piece of land in

there that overlapped some of Sun-Times property, so there were major issues

on who owned which land. Trump agreed with the city that we'd rebuild

about a block and a half of the double layer of Wabash Street, because it

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needed to be rebuilt and he would receive the land benefits for the tower

achieved by a slight realignment of the roadway. So we did that and basically

we were able to use a parking garage underneath Wabash Street right by the

river, and then the tower was going up just to the east of that. It was a

challenging site just to go on up. Now beyond that you had, of course, the

Wrigley Building, which has a lot of architectural significance and historical

significance to Chicago. You have IBM on the western side of the project that

also had, probably not quite as much long-term historical value in Chicago

but it certainly had architectural interest in Chicago. You had condominiums

that were already established directly to the north, so everybody was worried

about would this new tower overpower their building, or they could no

longer see the river. But I mean, life is life. There's no adjacent building that

can have rights over someone else's building. There was a lot of work done

with the Wrigley Building, and really, setting back the Trump Tower towards

the west, towards Wabash Street was part of that.

Blum: Did the project need the approval of the aldermen?

Korista: Oh sure. You need the planning approval. After you finally get planning

approval in front of the planning commission, then you have to be sponsored

by your alderman in the city council. Actually the city council votes on every

building, that's not per whatever the original planning approval was, so

every change in planning approval for each site has to be voted on by the

council. So you have to have your alderman backing it.

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Blum: And what about Mayor [Richard M.] Daley?

Korista: Oh yeah. Sure. That's number one.

Blum: Did he want Trump Tower?

Korista: The path isn't very straight to Mayor Daley, but certainly he was interested in

having Trump build a building here. He wanted certain things that Trump

didn't necessarily want, but it was a fantastic site. So the idea of building it

once the Sun-Times decided that was not going to be where they were going

to be able to stay made it that much more interesting of a building.

Blum: What was the problem with the spire? Is it a spire or an antenna?

Korista: It's not an antenna. It's just an architectural spire. SOM had variations of it

that were much more complex ones, but obviously they cost money. Trump

for the buildings that he'd built in New York that weren't this tall, had never

had a spire on top. It was just a roof, and the spire here was different.

Blum: Well, why did he want one here in Chicago?

Korista: Well, in Chicago Sears and Hancock both have spires on top. They're actually

antennas; they're not architectural. The Amoco Building didn't. The Amoco

Building was just a flat top, and Mayor Daley didn't like that. He likes the

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old, you know, the older buildings in Chicago have some kinds of

architectural treatment to the top.

Blum: Was the spire Trump's or Daley's taste?

Korista: So Daley was interested in that, so he was really the one that was pushing the

idea to have something up there. And there was a lot of debate. In fact, there

was one meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Daley that got very heated,

just on the sake of putting something up there. Now it wasn't that he had to

put this up there; it was just something up there was needed. Mayor Daley's

opinion was that it was in the Chicago tradition of tall buildings, that they

had something that kind of extended to the sky. And then you have

architectural critic, Blair Kamin, who played a very strong role in giving his

opinions on Trump Tower. He is the Tribune's architectural critic, and he

played a very strong role and sometimes his opinions are good.

Blum: Are you saying there were some that were not?

Korista: There were probably some that we didn't agree with, but at least Blair had a

chance to say something, because there was a more than normal time period

of preliminary design and tuning the building and trying to get these

property disputes done down below, so there was time to critique the

building before it ever got up there. it did, not just because of him, but it did

change shape.

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Blum: Is the spire up there now?

Korista: Yeah, the spire––the structure...

Blum: I thought they couldn't install it because of wind on the day when it was

planned to be done.

Korista: For the first two tries we were down here. I knew you don't want to put

spires up in the wintertime, because there's too much wind and it's too cold.

That might be good for a helicopter, but it's just too cold and it's too windy

for the workmen connecting the pieces. So the first two times they just

couldn't do it. Then they actually changed, they were taking off the outsides

of the architectural cladding of the structural elements of the spire, that gave

them more wind sail area because it just made the whole thing too big. So we

suggested they just take that cladding off and try to put the structure up, so

that's what you see up there now. The small gray pieces that you see will be

the actual architectural cladding that will now have to be put on bringing it

up from the roof. So it's not complete, but it is up there to its total height.

Blum: That is an area that's very rich in buildings. Adrian said this was the context

for his building: the Wrigley Building, Marina City, and IBM at the various

levels.

Korista: Certainly because of the function of the building, offices need more space

because you need more area per floor. As you get into hotels you need less

246 space. If you get into condominiums you need even less space, because there's just no way to use all the space from the core of the building to the outside. In offices you want forty or forty-five feet from the core to the window wall, and for condominiums twenty feet many times is more than enough because otherwise you have almost a bowling alley in your condominium. So there was a functional reason that the building should set back. Then when we started looking at the massing, which we worked quite a bit with structurally, the setbacks were beneficial. Actually the more disruptive the massing is, the better off it is for wind, because as the wind flows past the building, it doesn't organize. There's things called wind vortices which actually organize as the wind goes around the building and they can actually push the building in the opposite direction to the wind. The wind might be to the north, and this building's moving east and west because of these vortices. These wind vortices can organize when you have more similar sides; a rectangular building has the potential for a lot more vortex behavior than something that has rounded corners or setbacks. So the setbacks were functionally purposeful; they had to be built into the architecture, because you just couldn't make condominiums that were as big as what started out as office floors down below. There is a series of setbacks, and architecturally then certainly Adrian did look at the adjacent buildings.

So certainly there is a setback, a lower setback that relates to one of the cornice lines of Wrigley. There's a setback that relates to the top of Wrigley, and then there's a setback that relates to, basically, the top of the IBM building. And then the using of curves; we started out actually with not curved corners. They were actually more of a blunted-angle corner, which

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was trying to improve the amount of condominiums you could have that

would give you views up and down the river, but that kind of changed.

Everybody agreed, including the Trump organization, that rounded would

be better. That's also being in sympathy with the nearby Marina Towers,

which of course are circles, but it's the curvilinear nature of the corners. So

you have the straight rectangular edges of IBM, then you now have the

Trump, which has curved corners and its setbacks. One side matches Wrigley

and one side matches the top of IBM, and then you have the curved corners

that match Marina Towers.

Blum: So much of the shape is for functional reasons.

Korista: Basically the effort was to get as much condominium and hotel area on the

riverside, or looking out toward the lake. They are quite spectacular views,

and that's about the way the site was. The site is kind of an elongated

trapezoid that's extended direction northeast/southwest. It's parallel to the

river and the river is––it's not a big ninety-degree bend, that's farther down

west on the river––but it is bending quite a bit there from where you come in

through the locks, and Wabash is the center of this big bend. So there was a

lot of work with the city; there was a lot of work with the city bridge

engineering group in the city because we redid two levels of Wabash Street

structure. There was a lot of work with the Corps of Engineers and the Coast

Guard because we were coming up against the river wall, and that's still yet

to be finished as far as final finishes go. We were using river water for the

mechanical systems, as that was being done on the old system. Sometimes

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you can take in river water and then push out river water as long as it doesn't

have too much temperature differential. You can use that for your cooling

water for your air conditioning systems.

Blum: There was a mishap when a beam was dropped or fell. How often does

something like that happen?

Korista: That doesn't happen very often. Not often, it's unusual. In fact, I'm not even

too sure I remember where that was.

Blum: It dropped on the IBM roof. Does that ring a bell?

Korista: That wasn't part of, no, I don't actually remember that. It was part of the

contractor's crane system. It wasn't a big structural beam, it was just a piece

that came off.

Blum: Would you speak about the special kind of concrete that was used?

Korista: That was all very high-performance, high-strength concrete. Also we had a

new concrete that we used for the first time in Chicago, and it hasn't been

used too much in the U.S. It's called self-consolidating concrete. So to you

and me, if we looked at it, it would look like it was almost muddy water, it

has that much flowability. You use it because it can flow very easily, and we

had a lot of large columns and large girders that had a lot of reinforcing bars

inside. So it was very difficult to get the concrete down through and around

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the reinforcing, so this more fluid concrete was used. There was also a lot of

the highest-strength concrete that's been used in Chicago thus far. We used

the self-consolidating concrete. We used probably some of the deepest rock

caissons ever constructed. We did special tests on these rock caissons which

increased the allowable caisson loads for this project. Since then, for the next

deep foundation project in Chicago, which was the Spire, since they've

already put the caissons in there, they used very similar testing and found

they could raise up what the city of Chicago building department would

allow for capacity of even the Trump Tower foundation rock caissons. So we

did get things moving in that direction. Because it's a non-symmetric

building it tends not to be a rectangular building or symmetric building––

basically all the loads are not centered. Certainly when you think of setbacks,

if you draw a line up the tower you can see that there's no consistent center;

it's going to be eccentric, which causes other structural engineering problems.

It was a heavy building because in essence there's 104 floors of reinforced

concrete, even though the top floor is called ninety-two. Again, here we go!

Blum: Counting doesn't seem to count with high-rises.

Korista: There's 104 actual concrete levels from grade to the top. So again, it's just

what people want to call it. Hancock is always talked about as 100 floors.

Well, there's actually about ninety-eight floors in Hancock, but after ninety-

five they quit counting, because that's where the restaurant is and what's

above that is mechanical and communications equipment things. So there's

always a game…

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Blum: Are there any green features in the Trump building?

Korista: Well, I mean yes, certainly on the outside there's a lot of glass and people

would say that's not green because it's not energy saving, so we did a lot of

work on the types of glass. Even though it's a relatively clear glass, it's very,

very good as far as shading for sun, and also reducing the radiation that you

lose from building heating systems in the winter. So that's high-end. It's also

all concrete, and most concrete materials. Although people don't realize it,

these are green because we use not only poured cement, which is not green

because it uses added energy to make cement, but we use ground-up slag

from steel mills. This means you've got a product that's done, so all we're

doing is grinding which means not much more energy is put into it. We also

use a thing called fly ash, which is the ash they catch off of coal-burning

power plants. So those are ingredients you reuse in the concrete; you can say

concrete has always been actually a very user-friendly, material. We're

always working for less initial energy input, but it's already got multiple

aspects with all of the reinforcing bars in there that are all recycled steel, so

they're not just using new steel for the reinforcing. So yeah, there is that, and

certainly the city pushed green features at the base of the building, and

within the mechanical HVAC systems there's a lot of energy-saving devices

such that when people are not in their condominium and the system senses

it, it decides whether to push the button or not. The lights go off and there are

certain ones that go on, or the heat goes down even though you didn't

remember to push the button on the thing. There were photosensitive

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devices, and there were quite a few. After 9/11 there was a lot of concern

about safety in tall buildings. This building, which was not too unnatural, has

concrete cores; they were not octagonal, they were actually linear elements.

All of the stairwells are located inside concrete cores, which makes them

more fire-resistant and more robust if, heaven help us, if somebody else runs

an airplane into a building. So there are things like that. There are redundant

secondary electrical systems, secondary water systems, secondary fire pump

systems, so there's a lot of redundancy built into a building like this.

Blum: What was the experience like for you working on this building?

[Tape 5: Side B]

Korista: There weren't really any movie stars, I don't think, I worked with. Because

Donald was never there, he really only showed up at one project meeting and

that was it.

Blum: I thought his son was also in charge.

Korista: Well, with Donald Trump––I guess he's the movie star. His oldest son,

Donald, Jr., is quite an interesting young man. All his family is getting

involved in the real estate business.

Blum: And Trump's daughter as well.

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Korista: She graduated, I think from… they all have MBAs from Harvard or Penn,

and she's come online in the last couple of years. Donald, Jr. was there from

the beginning. They were in a learning role, and took an active part. Donald,

Jr. was active throughout the process and still is active there. His daughter,

on this project, has only been the last couple of years. She's involved in other

of his projects like the Trump Casino is Las Vegas that's just been completed.

So she's taken more of an interest in that. But it appears that all three of his

children because he has three older children and then he has two or three

younger ones. Okay, so--the three older ones all had some input. There's

Donald, Jr., there's Ivanka and Eric. Eric is, I think, the youngest of those, but

they're all within two years or so of each other. They all have very good

educations and they're actually very bright and not difficult personalities––

although they may later become––as Donald. They seem to be genuinely

interested in real estate and development, and obviously, in making money.

Blum: Were there things that you did and you learned from the Trump Tower

project that you were able to carry over to the next tall building you worked

on?

Korista: I've always said that every building, every project, is different, whether it's a

small project or a tall project or a low project. And so I think––if you're

functioning at all, you are going to learn something from every single project

about structural engineering, about architecture, about construction and

about human nature. Many times at SOM, I've been significantly involved

with the technology of architecture that I believe is closely related to

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structural engineering technology. I guess I was trying to boost this

technology, and this goes back thirty years. There is an engineering

technology component to exterior façades: glass and mullions and cables and

so forth. They used to be treated, as the architect just said he wanted that

color glass and then after that he'd let go. Or he might say, "I don't want the

mullion any bigger than that, and then he'd just kind of let go, and as long as

he got that, then he was happy. But we've become much more sophisticated

in use of materials; you have to use thinner materials. So the structural

engineering component of architectural technology of façade systems is very

important now. So again, I play quite a role in trying to get our architects to

believe in that, to get people like Adrian to believe that there's an engineering

component of this, it's not just this color stone, which is important

aesthetically. Because we had to, just from a cost standpoint, everything had

to become thinner and thinner and higher and higher tech, that then pretty

soon you really lost all of the safety. In fact there are intuitive safeties––

Gordon Bunshaft never did a building that had stone on it that was less than

probably three- or four-inches thick. Well, almost all of the stone that's been

used on buildings, in the last twenty-five or thirty years, is probably only an

inch and a quarter.

Blum: Like a veneer?

Korista: Yes. Well, it's not really a veneer, it's just cutting the stone down thinner.

Simply that says that before when it was thick like this, you didn't have to

worry too much about the structural aspect as long as it didn't, by weight, fall

254 off the building. But when it gets to be thinner, you have to start worrying about how much the wind blows on it and can you crack the stone, can you crack the glass? We have butt-glazed glass where there's no mullion behind it, so you just see continuous glass. You have cable-supported glass, so we've developed more and more related architectural technology and structural technology. There are firms that are independent and do nothing more than structural engineering technology for façade systems. They're not contractors; they're just another type of consultant, like an acoustic consultant or now, window wall façade consultants. SOM tries to do all of those in-house, and we do a pretty good job, but it's only been the last fifteen or twenty years that architecturally, or a segment of technical architecture, has really started to pay attention to this area. Those things are also a learning experience, because the façade actually responds to the structure. So whatever the structure is doing, right or wrong, the façade tries to do the same thing. If the façade is not ductile enough, or able to move also, that the façade can have problems on buildings. So, let alone what the color looks like. Does it provide shade or does it radiate or not radiate heat? Then there's a structural component to that kind of technology, which has grown in importance as we do nicer and more complex façades. Again, even on Trump there was a lot of work on that aspect in order to get the stainless and the appropriate glass and the curvilinear faceted shapes, and there were big, long, tall glass mullions down on the ground-floor level, all of which are very special types of façade.

So I think Adrian, although he'd say he knows all about façades would kind of agree that he should have a good structural engineer with him for his façades, not to aesthetically appreciate it, but to be sure it functionally will

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work. The façade there at Trump Tower was very different than the façade at

Jin Mao.

Blum: Was there any carryover to your next project?

Korista: Looking forward, of course, to the next large project we all became involved

with, and certainly I was working together with Bill Baker who is, again, one

of the young structural engineering partners. Now he's built up his structural

knowledge over a period of years. We basically, almost at the same time as

Trump, started working on the Burj Dubai, and that was one of the first big

tall buildings in Dubai. The client is EMAAR Development, which is nothing

more than a development entity of the sheiks or the emirs, and of his sons or

cousins. The emir in the United Arab Emirates, there is an emir of each

Emirate who is basically the owner of all the land and they own all the

revenue and they build it out through development companies. So this was

the first start of this development company in doing a tall building. The

tallest thing they had done was like a four-story building. His aim was to do

the tallest building in the world. Nobody knew what the tallest building in

the world was going to be, but through a lot of preliminary studies, and so

forth, we basically shaped a building that was somewhere between 700 and

900 meters tall, probably twice the height of the Sears Tower.

Blum: How did this job come to Adrian?

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Korista: It was a competition, of which they specifically asked for Adrian to be

involved in the SOM submission. So we weren't competing against the other

SOM offices, we were competing with other firms. I think they did also lean

towards SOM because we had gone through Sears, Hancock, and Jin Mao

over a period of, at that time, thirty years, almost forty years. So we had some

experience. They were concerned about the structural engineering of it,

because the taller it goes, the more the structural engineering, and its

behavior predominates. Certainly they hadn't done anything like this there in

Dubai; the tallest building in Dubai in 2004 was about a forty-story building

when we started building Burj Dubai. We're talking about a building that

was 170 stories, the last named floor is 170th floor and it still goes up beyond

that as far as the architecture is concerned. So we're talking about a building

whose top spire is just now being completed as we sit here talking, and is

somewhere in the excess of 800 meters tall. Certainly the tallest building by

far in the world. Although there have been many other buildings in the last

six months that have been proposed up to a kilometer high, or a thousand

meters, or some have even proposed a mile-high building, which would be

1600-meter tall building. In today's economic market, those are not going to

happen very quickly, after Burj is done.

Blum: It sounds like the Burj Dubai is perhaps what Ada Louise Huxtable, the

architecture critic for the New York Times had in mind when she said,

"Structural engineers can make anything stand up. They are the mad

scientists of architecture." Do you think that's an apt description?

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Korista: I think that there's nothing that's impossible. I think one of the things that––

not just the structural engineers at SOM but SOM has taken on––they're

willing to take on any challenge, and our record shows that we have

successfully met all the various challenges for the whole seventy years of the

firm. So this is just one more challenge and this happened to be in tall

buildings. Saying it's a mad scientist, I don't think it's a mad scientist. It's

really all the steps that came before, starting with a lot of Faz Khan's work

that carried through Hal's work, carried through my work, and now is being

carried on with Bill Baker and Mark Sarkisian who is in our San Francisco

office. There is a purpose of having continuity in the SOM structural

engineering group, and it has worked, because we have shown that we can

take on the challenges yet to be dreamed about and do them successfully,

and do them where they're economically viable. Many buildings today are

being conceptually designed, and they're just too complicated; it's geometric

complication because of computers as we talked about before, they're simply

too complicated and they will never be built because constructability has just

been set aside. When we did Burj Tower, working with Adrian again, here's

Burj Tower, what does it do? It has setbacks as you go up the building. Now

the setbacks actually form a spiral effect, and the way the spiral moves up the

building is in fact in the correct direction relative to Islam, which has a spiral

to the sun. I may not get this right, it has a correct direction of pathway

symbologywise to the heavens. So that spiral that's achieved by these

setbacks actually is a spiral geometrically; structurally it's just a series of

setbacks going around a core. But the setbacks all help to control the wind;

wind was going to be the predominating thing. We did many, many wind

258 studies to find out what the wind environment is in the upper altitudes of this building, and actually got Adrian to turn the building such that we got the optimum direction of wind hitting the building as far as the accelerations and structural performances go. We used all concrete. Most of the tall buildings have been steel or composite. Concrete was the system that was most normal to construction in that area of the world, versus getting a lot of steel. Dubai and all the Emirates have to import all their products, so it's just a matter of whether you're going to import more concrete materials or more steel materials. So we used concrete. So it's the world's tallest building; it's the world's tallest concrete building; it's the world's tallest residential building.

It's all kinds of things of being tall and it is tall. Each building, both structurally and façade systemwise, generate behaviors on the interior which are called stack effects. They are a function of pressure differentials from the outside of the building to the inside, which in turn are really caused by temperature differentials between the inside and outside. On a smaller building it's not too noticeable, although it's there. You go into the Hancock

Center or Sears, and sometimes when you get in the elevators you hear air passing you by. Well, that's actually the stack effect. It's not wind getting in the building, it's air movement caused by pressure differentials between temperatures outside and inside the building. Well, the taller that goes, the more the stack effect is. So we try to relieve the induced stack effect by actually physically venting it, so that at the top of the building you're not being blown off the top or at the bottom exterior doors are blown open, like what happened at Sears when we first did it. Actually we were blowing the

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doors off; the revolving doors would actually collapse just by stack effect

wind pressures coming from of the elevator shafts.

Blum: And were these issues with Burj?

Korista: Those were issues that we already knew about. We were talking about how

do we grow from one building to the next building, and it is a learning

process, and you do learn things that could be done better, and behaviorally

we can make them work better even though maybe the materials are the

same. It's the same way with the curtain wall, it's the same way with elevator

systems, all of which is the farther you go up all systems have to continue to

modify themselves to be able to progress upwards. Elevatoring systems can

make elevators go very, very fast, but the fastest elevators that are on the

tune of about 1800 feet/minute, which Sears Tower has. If you go much

beyond that, again, the person riding in them, if it's an express and it doesn't

stop every floor, or every five floors, it goes so fast that you do not feel

comfortable. You can feel this effect in Hancock, especially when you go up

to the 95th floor and you start feeling, "Oh, my stomach." What you're feeling

is acceleration, and the acceleration is a function of the speed. So although it's

nice to say they can move people from here to here very fast, you get to the

point where, actually, in tall buildings when some elevators need to go all the

way through… it goes so fast that people are uncomfortable in it. So things

you don't even think about become very important. The structure moves and

the elevator shaft is so long, we need to be concerned about the cables in

some of the elevator shafts because these elevator cables basically have to

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follow the horizontal movements and respond to the dynamic behavior of the

structure.

Blum: To manage the sway?

Korista: Plus in Dubai we were starting everything new. There wasn't the technology,

there weren't the contractors, there wasn't enough concrete. We had to have

bigger piles; we had to have higher-strength concrete; everything was two or

three notches up. Now since the whole country was just starting new at the

same time, it was easier than if you already had established industry there

and say, "Well, okay we want higher-strength concrete." "No, no, no, here,

just use some lower strength, because we know how to make it." Since they

weren't making any great amount of it there anyway, okay, they got the

equipment and the know-how and the quality control. So in that sense it

actually was an easier step forward, but it was still a monumental task.

Blum: Because you already had some of the knowledge?

Korista: Well, we had the knowledge, but if you walk into an area that's already

developed, there's certain resistance. I have a product; I know that probably

my product has got to get improved. We're up here saying, "Well, it

definitely has got to get improved." The supplier is saying, "Well, yeah, but if

I do that, it's going to cost some more money and I don't want to spend that

money." If you're starting with scratch, where people just have to start

making concrete or start making steel, then they're not fighting you, they're

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saying, "Okay, if that's what you want, then here it is," because you're kind of

starting from the ground floor.

Blum: How would you compare the two projects, the Burj Dubai with Trump

Tower?

Korista: Well, structurally they had similarities. Certainly Burj is twice as tall as

Trump, so we had a horrendous amount of wind engineering and again,

wind engineering is not something we did; this was done by the RWDI

consulting group in Canada. It's not something that's straight forward, where

you know exactly that you want to do this test and that test and that test. We

found with Burj, we had to do multiples of several different tests over and

over to kind of optimize its behavior. It's not so much that the building will

ever fall over, it's just the behavior of this building. People look at it and say,

"Well, it's a concrete building. It's not going to go anywhere." Well, it is.

That's a tall building.

Blum: You mean it will sway?

Korista: The sway or this acceleration of things, it really does happen, okay? When

you're up there you really can begin to feel things, let alone your eyes looking

out there and saying, It's a long ways down there! So it was exciting, because

each job, each project, wherever it is in the world, whoever the client is, to me

I try to treat it as brand new. So yes, I have historical background and

experience, but you try to take a fresh approach each time and not say, I

262 know it has to be that, I know it has to be this. I've found that just doesn't work, at least not for the kind of projects that we have which are where you have architects, and we're working in the private sector, and every client wants to have his own best thing for what they're doing. So Burj opened up a lot of different areas especially in the area of wind engineering. It opened up a lot of avenues that weren't there before. So we are advancing the state of the art of structural engineering in tall-building architecture from an aesthetic and massing standpoint. Tall-building architecture relative to architectural technology, and things like elevators and stairs and the way you get people out of the building because all of a sudden you talk about somebody that's got to move from the top of the building, which is 650 meters above ground, and we say, if there's a fire, go to the stairwell and walk down… It's humanly impossible to do things like that. So we have these more secure fire rated areas every so many floors, so if you had to walk down because you couldn't use the elevator, which is the normal way to get people in and out of buildings, you can walk down fifteen floors and there's a place which has more fire protection around it and then you can sit there and rest for a period of time. So the taller these buildings go, it's not just a matter of everybody looks at them as, how tall is it? Sometimes people, I hope, still look at the architecture of it. It is kind of insidious, this idea of, it's just got to be taller. I don't care what it looks like, just taller and taller and taller. And really, you said, "Why taller?" And it is ego. A lot of times it's national or city ego of, why not taller?

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Blum: A building that you worked on, another tall building, Pearl River Tower in

[Guangzhou], China. It seems that this is a building of today because of all its

environmental considerations.

Korista: Yes, we went into the building with a significant environmental focus; it was

an architectural competition. Most tall buildings in China are based upon a

competition.

Blum: How does one of those competitions work?

Korista: They usually invite a series of international architects and sometimes Chinese

architects.

Blum: Who were some of the other architects that were you’re your competitors?

Korista: Oh, for that particular one I'll say I forget, because every one is different. It's

not necessarily always American architects. They usually have European

architects, and sometimes they have some of the very, very large Chinese

design firms. Chinese design institutes do a lot of design. So it's really only

the special buildings that anyone from outside China really is invited to try to

do. One of their competition criteria was to try to make it a very "green"

building in the environmental sense. That was the client's desire. Now one of

the things we found out to begin with was that the client was basically one of

the largest cigarette manufacturers in China.

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Blum: It's somewhat contradictory, don't you think?

Korista: So actually they had the right idea. Actually the original name of the building

was not Pearl River, Pearl River is the river that cuts through from Hong

Kong to Guangzhou, which used to be known as Canton. The Pearl River is a

well-known river that goes into China. So this site sits near the Pearl River.

The client actually changed the project name, because it started out to be the

National China Tobacco Tower, or something like that.

Blum: Oh, Pearl River is a much more romantic name.

Korista: The client asked in their competition brief that the building had to have good

architecture; they gave you the site and they said it was supposed to be as

green as possible, whatever that meant. They didn't say exactly how. So we

did a lot of work. Actually in the competition we did more looking at and

describing how you could make green systems, which have a lot to do with

the MEP systems, but it also got into shaping the building.

Blum: Was there any connection between the shape of the building and the winds?

Korista: We thought, well, you can shape the building, you can turn the building as

far as where the maximum winds are or the lesser winds are, because over a

year's period there's always a predominating wind direction where the

higher winds come from. Like in Chicago, the highest winds that

predominate are somewhere from the west/southwest direction. Now there's

265 always winds from all different directions, but the higher ones and more frequent ones are from that direction. You can try to turn the building so that you're not driving a lot of wind into the building which causes additional energy for cooling. Most buildings with all their computers are almost all cooled, and they need very little heating. Certainly in Guangzhou, China, that has a much warmer climate, they have almost no heating in this building. So cooling is important. Now, there's cooling, and we got this idea of well, if you shaped a building then that was okay with Adrian and helped us structurally as far as wind goes. Then we got this idea, why not in the mechanical rooms try to put––this was before the ones that went up in

Dubai––some type of wind props or windmills. But rather than just having them hang off the building, we'd actually bury them into a hole that we left through the building at the mechanical. So that was actually part of the competition. We actually have two major mechanical levels, and at each mechanical level we've created a hole through the building. Then in the interior of the hole or the center of the building, there's actually, we call them windmills, with a special prop. They're actually horizontal props and they generate electricity; they can generate quite a bit of electricity. Then you get into which way is the predominating wind? Because the wind is not always going to blow in one direction, just like any wind farm we see, if there's not a good predominating wind, then you put up a windmill and it doesn't do anything for you because the wind has got to be enough to make the windmill work, even though the windmill can twist around. There was a lot of discussion with respect to the shape of the building, configuration of the

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building, and now for energy of creating this wind, let alone structural

engineering for strength and the sway of the building.

Blum: Was all this effort put forth because you wanted to confuse the wind?

Korista: Well, the structural engineering part is always trying to confuse the wind.

Actually for the props you're trying to channel the wind into them, so part of

the curvatures, the surfaces of the two broad outside faces are actually

convex. They curve slightly in two different directions. Then we're using

double glass walls, so you have an exterior wall that provides a lot of the sun

resistance, and you can recirculate the air between the walls. You have an

inside wall, which is more of the habitable thing, but within the zone there

it's easier to control the temperature and not let all of the sunlight radiate all

the way on through to the interior space. So double wall technology, it is

expensive. And in Germany they used it probably first, and they've been

using it for twenty-five years, not in every building but on some buildings.

And you need to ventilate the space and the questions that the Chinese bring

up is just about natural ventilation. Now you get into tall towers, and you

can't have natural ventilation too much because opening up holes all the way

up in a tall tower just blows out. It doesn't blow away the inside, but it

changes the mechanical systems so badly that they can never come into

balance. There were issues on providing some natural venting. Our

mechanical engineering guys were trying to get to the point where they'd

have basically zero energy. At least on paper they started to come close. I

mean, you could generate enough electricity, and you had enough electricity

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to drive the cooling systems, because basically you were cooling the whole

building and not heating it; and to disperse the air of the energy from the

computers in the air and take temperature out of the air instead of just

introducing cooling in the air, which is a heat pump technology. And then in

the floor systems they have a cooling system of pipes, which gives you a cool

floor, so it's not like you're just dumping cold air from up in your walls

somewhere. You're actually cooling at the floor level, and when you do that

some of that cooling will drop down and some of the cooling will go up. So

that instead of having all these ducts and so forth, you're just doing it with

radiant cooling. That is what they call it. It's just a system of piping that is

actually in the floor system. They can be above the ceiling also, underneath

the structure. So it cuts down on the amount of cooling energy you need, and

basically the cooling energy that you're using is electrical energy. You're

trying to transpose enough electrical energy, basically, so you're not buying

electricity from outside. Then instead of using gas in the building, everything

is electric. Your hot water heaters, and so forth, are electric. There's all kinds

of special lighting and indirect lighting that significantly cuts down the

electrical load in the building. They're using a different type of high-voltage

electricity. Most of the world uses 220 volts. So they're transmitting electricity

closer to where it winds up being 220. All these things are energy savings,

and they come very close to…

Blum: Zero energy?

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Korista: …zero energy. Now probably it will never quite get there. All these different

things cost front-end money so it's always a kind of, "Well, how much extra

money can I put in the building?" which is always important. That's what

you have to pay for today, compared to when I look downstream, how much

savings am I going to achieve? And that is a tough decision. It's a very easy

subject to talk about; it's a very difficult subject if you're a client trying to

balance what you say or I say about what's going to happen downstream.

That's where you get the savings from not buying so much electricity and not

trying to buy gas and all these kinds of things.

Blum: Did the client feel that a zero-energy building had been achieved? Was he

satisfied?

Korista: We had to do it again and again. Being in Guangzhou we had to go through

several meetings with the experts to try to convince them. I don't know that

anybody believes that it's 100 percent zero energy, but they all agree that it

comes much closer than anything that's been built. Again, it's trying to use,

more efficiently, systems that are already there. Double wall technology is

not reinventing glass or how to support glass. It's just using different kinds of

glass with different components within the glass, and then using two series

of them. Venting the space between the two walls is not new technology, but

it's trying to efficiently do that, to kind of give you a buffer between the

outside and the inside conditions.

Blum: Is this building, the Pearl River Tower, a model for tomorrow's buildings?

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Korista: Well, it certainly has gotten a lot of publicity and people will be very

interested, once it's done. The structure of it is probably up about thirty floors

out of an eighty-story building, so all of these energy savings still are yet to

be determined. You're not going to find out until you start to operate the

building. Around the world it's certainly gotten a lot of publicity from all of

the environmental groups, LEED groups, saying, yeah, this is coming closer

than anybody who's tried to purposely do it before.

Blum: Stan, you have a pad of paper in front of you and it's filled with notes. I've

reached the end of the projects that I selected for you to speak about, and I

wonder if there were any that you'd like to include.

Korista: No, I think we've probably covered a wide variety of different projects, and I

think that's what Stan is all about. I had an opportunity that very few people

have had to work on so many different types of projects. We focused on,

mostly taller building projects, but certainly we've had stadiums in there,

we've had educational buildings in there. I think my professional career,

which has been forty-four years and counting, most of which was at SOM,

has really been a wonderful rewarding experience of being able to work on

different things with different people in different places.

Blum: Well, it seems it was a two-way street, because I looked at the book you

showed me, the tribute book given to you on the occasion of your retirement,

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in which your colleagues recorded their comments and reminiscences. They

certainly appreciated you.

Korista: Well, I think with any professional career to be fulfilling, everyone finds their

own niche, is as good a word as any, that you then excel in. Generally I've

been involved in structural engineering. I had a wonderful opportunity to

work with a large internationally renowned firm of Skidmore, Owings and

Merrill. They were there long before I was there, and I've been there for quite

a long period of time. Certainly coming out of school I had no idea that I'd

ever work on and be part of the design of so many significant projects and to

travel to something like thirty-two states and twenty-seven countries over a

period of forty years. There's a lot of travel buried in there, but I don't think

anybody would have fathomed that that could be true. But that's again––

working in different areas with different people with different clients––with

our own base architectural and engineering group has really led to the

interest. You have to have an interest in your career, otherwise it's not going

to reach fruition, at least in my opinion. Different things cause different

people to get excited about their careers. Certainly, in structural engineering I

had an opportunity which was unusual, to work with Dr. Fazlur Khan and

Hal Iyengar, who kind of pioneered the tall building part of architecture,

post-World War II. It was great to be there at the right time. They were there

at the right time, and to have an architectural partner like Bruce Graham who

became significantly interested in tall buildings––not that tall buildings are

all of architecture or maybe anything more than a small part of architecture––

they are things that certainly get a lot of publicity. They are challenging from

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a structural engineering standpoint, and they absolutely demand the

integration of architecture and structural engineering, now that integration

can lead to better architecture for buildings that may be only two-stories high

or one-story high.

Blum: As you look back over the length of your career, what is the greatest change

or changes that you are aware of?

Korista: Well, from 1965 to 2008, there are certainly undeniably changes in styles of

architecture, but architecture has always changed.

Blum: Do you mean from the modernism to the post-modernism?

Korista: Or whatever it has become is very difficult for people to accurately define

what is the current mode of architecture. Certainly I've seen changes, or my

perception in being a structural engineer, has seen changes, working with

different architects that had different interests and things that drove them

forward. So I think that a change of architecture is probably number one, and

I think number two is the computer. The computer has had a large impact, as

we discussed before. Sometimes I believe it's not always a positive impact,

but it's certainly a very useful tool for both architecture, and especially

structural engineering. I think those two are probably the largest issues of

change. Now as far as rewarding experiences, I think it's constantly being

able to do yet another new project, that's a different project, although people

many times have said, "That's an SOM project," but I've never worked on two

272 that came anywhere close to being the same thing. Internally people always strive to make it different. Now maybe it wasn't different enough, but it was different. The goal has always been to have excellence in architecture and engineering, as the final output of the physical entity which is finally built. I think that since I began at SOM, I have had a great chance to work on probably about 260 different primary projects. Of those that I've worked on over the years, 99 percent of them have been built. Not only did you have design structures, they had to be built. So that means there was only two or three projects, literally, that I worked on in some aspect that were never built.

That's pretty unusual. There's probably been an additional sixty or seventy smaller projects like pedestrian bridges, or working on sculptures with sculptors, again, probably almost 100 percent of those were built. All of these projects, in my career, have been a challenge not only in finding a compatible way or a good chemistry way of working with architects and clients, but to be able to take those projects on successfully from concept through the construction, which means constructability. Constructability means designing buildings that are so complex that nobody in the world can possibly build them, which is important in some of the architecture today, and being able to get them built. I'm a strong believer that for all architecture, for all structural engineering, the physical reality as properly built, in conjunction with excellence of architecture design and engineering, is really the way in which it makes an impact on the world, on the environment, on architecture and engineering, on the nature of the project relative to people or to history. Concepts are great, but concepts that can be brought all the way through to physical reality really tell a story and really have a history.

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Blum: What would you tell the next generation of engineers if you could?

Korista: I think never be satisfied with what they perceive is the current status quo, to

always strive to be reaching ahead, whatever that means. I think if you're

going to be in the field of buildings and architecture and structural

engineering you have to develop a personal chemistry with the architects

you're working with. Not only the architect leaders but all the way down the

line, so that they understand that there's this integration, especially between

the structure and the architecture that just demands to be there. That doesn't

mean the structure has to be exposed to view, but the coordination between

architecture and engineering is very, very important. Most engineers don't

get enough of art form when they go to school, or art, or architecture. Most of

them get basically engineering, engineering, engineering, and more

engineering, which isn't always so good. Most engineers lack in speaking

skills; they lack in not having taken enough courses in other tangential areas

which broadens everyone's perspective of the world. So it's really that you

have to reach out and not be satisfied to just be only an engineer-engineer.

Blum: What was your greatest opportunity in your career?

Korista: I think the greatest opportunity was the chance to work at SOM with at least

four distinctive talented architects: with Walter Netsch, Bruce Graham,

Myron Goldsmith, and lately Adrian Smith, because their work provided

wonderful opportunities. There's a certain amount of circumstance in

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everything; you cannot plan your whole career to do something unless I

guess you're an individual entity. So having the opportunity to work with

different people that operated over a wide spectrum of architecture provides

fertile ground for new thought. Mix that into being able to work with people

like Dr. Fazlur Khan, Hal Iyengar, John Zils, and now Bill Baker, all people

that were highly motivated in the development of structural engineering; of

moving it forward by developing a new system that's responsive, that's more

cost effective, ensuring that it can be constructed and not just drawn on a

piece of paper, finding ways in which to keep extending whatever part of the

total building there is, being involved in the façade systems and the

engineering of façade systems. Those are all challenges that a lot of people

never get a chance to do; they're doing only structural engineering. The most

significant thing I would tell anyone is to think, to think with your own

human brain, and not get caught up in thinking there's some mechanical

brain out there that's going to do your thinking for you. I really feel very

strongly about this key issue, especially with respect to what I observe from

today's bright younger professionals coming out from our best universities.

Blum: What comes next for Stanton Korista?

Korista: Well, hopefully I will have some more years where I can continue on a

consulting basis primarily with structural engineering, and I'm sure there'll

be some architectural technology there at SOM. I'm sure there will be some

additional great projects that will evolve with new challenges yet to be

resolved.

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Blum: How would you like to be remembered?

Korista: I think I'd like to be remembered as a humanistic––whatever that exactly

means––a structural engineer, who could respond effectively to a lot of

different challenging projects, a great many of differing architects, a lot of

different bright engineers, a wide array of different clients in many different

places, and a vast number of different contractors. It would be someone who

could respond well from a technical standpoint, but also keep things in a

human scale and a reality scale that we can accomplish. The achieving of the

physical reality for each project is very important to me. I've always said, and

that was even before I knew a lot about architecture, I loved to build things.

In this case my professional career has been buildings, so I love to build

buildings. I still do. I guess we all have to slow up sometime, and I'm in that

zone, but it's still doing something I love to do. I had a chance to meet and

work with a lot of wonderful and talented people. I think I've been a mentor

to a large, large number of structural engineers and technical architects, and

I'm sure, hopefully, to some design architects relative to integrated building

technology. I believe that, generally, I've also been looked on favorably by the

construction community; that I was sympathetic to actually trying to build

some of these structures that we create. This is especially true in the private

enterprise sector versus much larger global projects where you are in control

of everything versus private sector where you're only one member of the

team. Once upon a time, I think I was graduating from undergrad studies

and there was an article in the school newspaper and it summarized my

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attributes by saying, "Well, Stan Korista looks like he will truly be a civil

engineer," civil in the broad sense of civil, the humanistic sense of civil. I

think, that's what my legacy will be. Hopefully I've fulfilled a piece of the

SOM legacy as far as excellence in design; in both structural engineering and

architecture. I couldn't accomplish, really, any of this without a personal

support group, because it does take a lot of endurance and durability and

tenacity to stay after these things and spend three quarters of your life, forty

years of your life chasing around on planes and trains and cars. All those

things need support, and I've always had a very supportive family. My wife

and my children and even grandchildren have been most important in my

professional career.

Blum: Do you have any children who have followed in your footsteps?

Korista: No, I don't have any children that have followed in my footsteps. They did, at

times, when my children were smaller, have a board keeping count of how

many days I wasn't at home at night, and where I was in the world. It was

before email and all those things where you now more easily communicate

back to home. So really, to have had a very supportive family environment

has supported me; aiding me in maintaining the durability and the tenacity

to successfully complete professional goals is probably the most important

aspect.

Blum: Would you do it again if you had the chance?

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Korista: Definitely. I might say I might have started out building bridges versus

buildings, and I’m sure there are a lot of challenges there, but for structural

engineering very definitely yes. Having the ability to work across a broad

spectrum, I think, is what to me has been the most challenging and the

greatest reward. A lot of people don't like to interact with people. I've been so

many places where you don't speak the same language, but you can still find

ways to interact. When I got out of school, certainly, I never envisioned I'd be

eating some of the things that help the cultural dialog. I can remember we

had steamed rice, hot peppers and steamed banana leaves in Surabaya,

Indonesia, and an eight-course meal of snake in Hong Kong, eel and turtle in

Shanghai, blowfish in Tokyo, kimchi in Seoul, and shepherd's pie in London,

which we all can kind of come close to, but not three meals a day of drinking

iced vodka in Moscow. Once in Kuwait, I had just arrived and I think the

second day that I was there, I wound up having a meal of goat stew, and we

were in a tent out in the desert with some Bedouins that somehow were

related to our client. So all those things were very fascinating cultural and

people things, so hopefully I'm known as having contributed something not

only to the development of the structural engineering profession but also to

the interaction between peoples internationally, globally.

Blum: Well, I think you've made your mark in the tribute book prepared by your

colleagues for you on the occasion of your retirement. They say such nice

things about you, especially because you were a mentor, formally and

informally, to many of your colleagues and associates. Thank you Stan for

278 sharing your memories with us of the adventure, you call your career, in the field of architecture.

279

SELECTED REFERENCES

Abrahams, Paul. "Designing a Building That Will Move With the Times." Financial Times London (19 May 1989): 22.

Adams, Nicholas. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: the experiment since 1936. Milan, Italy: Mondadori Electa, 2006.

Baker, William; D. Stanton Korista, Dane Rankin; Robert Sinn. "Specifying High Performance Concrete for Trump Tower Chicago." Proceedings of the ASCE/SEI Structures Congress, 2008.

–––––––– ; D. Stanton Korista; Lawrence Novak; James Pawlikowski, Bradley Young. "The Structural Design of the World's Tallest Structure: The Burj Dubai Tower." Paper presented at the IABSE International Association for Bridge Engineering Congress, Chicago, 18 September 2008.

–––––––––; D. Stanton Korista; Robert Sinn; Karl Pennings; Dane Rankin. "Trump International Hotel and Tower." Concrete International (July 2006):28-32.

Byrne, Timothy. "Home of the Highrise: The Architecture of SOM." Crit. (Fall 1983): 42-46.

Carlozo, Louis R. "How Trump Tower Opened While Still Adding on Floors." Chicago Tribune (12 June 2008).

Chapin Davidson, Cynthia. "Urbane Renewal: Rowes Wharf by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill." Inland Architect 33 (September/October 1989): 43-49.

Davey, Monica. "Chicago May Give 'Apprentice' Lesson in Reality." New York Times (17 April 2004).

Diesenhouse, Susan. "As Trump Tower Rises, Worries Pile Up." Chicago Tribune (18 September 2005).

Goldberger, Paul. "Architects Meet to Note Failure of Modernism." New York Times (11 December 1980): 19.

––––––––. "Architecture View; Chicago Has a New Profile." New York Times (8 May 1983): 31

––––––––. "Critic's Notebook; Chicago and New York, Architectural Rivals." New York Times (26 April 1984): C19.

––––––––. "New Madison Avenue Buildings, A New New York." New York Times (18 December 1980): 21.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. "Found––and Lost––in Translation." Wall Street Journal (6 February 2008): D7.

280

Keegan, Edward. "Drama Over Trump's Chicago Tower." Architectural Record 193 (1 April 2005): 37.

Klein, Sarah A. "Make No Little Plans; Chicago's Skyscrapers No Longer Stir the Blood, But They Still Matter. "Crain's Chicago Business (29 October 2007): 28.

L., S. "SOM's Skyscraper Innovation Has Moved To China." Architectural Record 194 (1 July 2006): 36.

May, Clifford D. "Many Architects Are Losing Jobs In The Recession." New York Times (19 January 1983): 1.

McGuigan, Cathleen, and Karen Springen. "Back to the Drawing Board." Newsweek (8 April 1991): 60.

Minthorn, David. "Soaring in a Different Direction." The Mercury (Australia) (21 July 2004): 20.

Oral History of Bruce John Graham. Interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998).

Oral History of Myron Goldsmith, Interviewed by Betty J. Blum (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1990).

Oser, Alan S. "About Real Estate: Chicago Influence in Third Ave. Building." New York Times (5 November 1980): 5.

Schock, Bob. "Trump Tower." Foundation Drilling XXVII (March/April 2006):10-14.

Slania, John T. "Big Project, Big Worry." ChicagoBusiness (7 August 2006).

––––––––. "Showing Skin." ChicagoBusiness (30 October 2006).

––––––––. "Trump's Stand-up Guy." Crain's Chicago Business (30 January 2006): 26-27.

––––––––. "The Trump Print." Crain's Chicago Business (29 October 2007): 38-39.

Smith, Adrian Devaun. The Architecture of Adrian Smith, 1980-2006, SOM: Toward a Sustainable Future. Mulgrave, Victoria, Australia: Images Publishing Group, 2007.

Vinci, John. The Art Institute of Chicago: The Stock Exchange Trading Room. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1977, revised and expanded 1989.

Tributes and reminiscences: From colleagues at SOM on the occasion of Stanton Korista's retirement, 2007.

281

D. STANTON KORISTA

Born: 19 November 1940, Chicago, Illinois

Education: Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, Bachelor of Science of Civil Engineering, 1962 University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, Master of Science of Civil- Structural Engineering, 1964

Work Experience: State of Illinois Department of Transportation/Highways, 1960-1962 (summers) Research Assistant, University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, 1962- 1963 Associated Engineers, Peoria, Illinois, 1964 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chicago, 1965+ Associate, 1971 Associate Partner, 1974 Partner 1986 Director, 1992 Retired, 2008 Consultant, 2008-present

Professional Registrations: Registered Professional Engineer (in thirty-three states) Registered Structural Engineer (in three states) Registered Civil Engineer (in five states) Chartered Structural Engineer, United Kingdom Chartered Civil Engineer, United Kingdom EUR Ing, European Union

Professional Honors: Fellow, Institution of Structural Engineers, United Kingdom Fellow, American Society of Civil Engineers Fellow, International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering, Zurich, Switzerland Structural Engineering Certification Board

Professional Association Memberships: American Bureau of Standards American Concrete Institute American Institute of Steel Construction Building Officials & Code Administrators International China Civil Engineering Society Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat The Federation Europenne d'Associations Nationales d' Ingenieurs (FEANI) Hong Kong Institute of Engineers

282

Illinois Society of Professional Engineers Institution of Civil Engineers, United Kingdom Institute of Engineers, Singapore National Society of Professional Engineers The Steel Construction Institute, United Kingdom Structural Engineers Association of Illinois Structural Engineering Institute University Club of Chicago Western Society of Engineers

Selected Projects: Burj Dubai Tower, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Canary Wharf, London, England H. H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota Jin Mao, Shanghai, China John Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois McMath Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona New World Center, Hong Kong, China Pearl River Tower, Guangzhou, China Republic Newspaper Plant, Columbus, Indiana Rowes Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois Sha Tin Reclamation NewTown, Hong Kong, China Trump Tower, Chicago, Illinois

283

APPENDIX: TECHNICAL PUBLICATIONS

Korista, D. Stanton, William Baker, Jeremy Kirk, Dane Rankin. “Trump International Hotel and Tower.” Structure (July 2009).

––––––––, Roger Frechette, Russell Gilchrist. “China Pushes Sustainability as Urbanization Continues – Pearl River Continues.” Engineering News-Record (October 2008).

––––––––, William Baker, Lawrence Novak. “Structural Design of the Burj Dubai Tower.” CTBUH Conference-Dubai (2008).

––––––––, William Baker, Lawrence Novak. “Burj Dubai: Engineering the World's Tallest Building.” The Structural Design of Tall and Special Buildings (November 2007).

––––––––, William Baker, Peter Irwin, Lawrence Novak, Peter Weismantle. “The Burj Dubai Tower: Wind Tunnel Testing – Cladding/Pedestrian Level.” Structure (August 2007).

––––––––, William Baker, J. Naswick, Lawrence Novak. “The Burj Dubai.” Concrete Construction (2007).

––––––––, William Baker, Dane Rankin, Robert Sinn. “Specifying High Performance Concrete for the Trump Tower.” ASCE Structures Congress – Vancouver, B.C. (2007).

––––––––, William Baker, Lawrence Novak. “Structural Design of the World’s Tallest Building.” Civil Engineers of Australia (2006).

––––––––, William Baker, Karl Pennings, Dane Rankin, Robert Sinn. “Trump International Hotel and Tower.” Concrete International (July 2006).

––––––––, William Baker, Matthew Houson, Dane Rankin, Robert Sinn. “High Performance, Self-Consolidating Concrete for North America’s Tallest Reinforced Concrete Building: Trump International Hotel and Tower-Chicago. Concrete International (2006).

––––––––, John Slania. “Trump’s Stand Up Guy.” Crain’s Business News (January 2006).

––––––––, Lawrence Novak. “Optimization of Structural Steel Building Systems – 555 W. Monroe, Chicago.” Modern Steel Construction (October 2004).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Charles Besjak, Al Khoshaba, Dane Rankin. “Glass, Steel and Cables Modernize the GM Renaissance Center.” Civil Engineering (August 2004).

––––––––, William Baker, Charles Besjak, Shane McCormick. “Shell of Steel.” Civil Engineering (April 2003).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq. “Controlling Subway Noise in the LG Arts Center, Kangnam Hall, Seoul, Korea.” Acoustics Engineering Journal (2003).

284

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq. “Design and Construction of the LG Kangnam Tower-Seoul, Korea.” Engineering News-Record (August 2002).

––––––––, Ronald Johnson, T. Li, Joseph Mo, Leslie Ouyang.”Soaring Wings Over Harbor – Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center Expansion.” Civil Engineering (July 1998).

––––––––, William Baker, Ronald Johnson, Robert Sinn. “Art and Engineering in the Design of Steel Building Structures.” Modern Steel Construction (1994).

––––––––, Allyn Hector, Robert Sinn. “A Tower for the Twenty First Century: Xiamen Posts and Telecommunications Building.” International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (February 1998).

––––––––, Ray J. Clark, J. Crocket. “New Set of Instruments Lets Hall Play On – Chicago Orchestra Hall Renovation.” Consulting-Specifying Engineer (February 1998).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “High Over Shanghai-Jin Mao Tower.” Civil Engineering (November 1997).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Wind Engineering of 88-Story Jin Mao Tower.” CTBUH Conference (1997).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Jin Mao Tower – Response of an Ultra-Tall Building to Moderate Seismic Forces.” ACI Annual Conference (1997).

––––––––, Mark Sarkisian. “Jin Mao Building-Shanghai, China.” The ULI Conference (1997).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, C. Mui, Mark Sarkisian. “Structural Engineering Innovation at SOM – Jin Mao Tower.” Civil Engineering (1996).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Creep, Shrinkage, and Elastic Shortening of the Jin Mao Tower.” ASCE Structures Congress (1996).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Unique Structural Engineering Solutions for China’s Tallest Building – Jin Mao Tower.” Engineering News-Record (1996).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Design and Construction of the Jin Mao Tower’s Mat Foundation.” Engineering News-Record (1996).

–––––––, W. Pump, J. Scott. “Installation and Loading Tests for Deep Piles in Shanghai Alluvium.” International Geotechnical Congress (1996).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “Jin Mao Tower’s Unique Structural System.” Shanghai International Seminar for Building Construction Technology (1995).

––––––––, Ahmad Abdelrazaq, Mark Sarkisian. “An Optimal Use of Concrete in High Rise Building Design – Jin Mao Tower.” NCMEC Conference – International Case Studies (1995).

285

––––––––, Mark Sarkisian. “A Unique Use of Post Tensioning in High Rise Structures.” Concrete International (1992).

––––––––, Mark Sarkisian. “Load Balancing Beams in Perimeter Beams of High Rise Buildings for Efficient Transfer of Column Loads.” ACI Annual Conference (1992).

––––––––. “A Cantilevered Reinforced Concrete Grille for Office Building in Atlanta, Georgia.” L’Industria Italiana del Cemento (March 1992).

––––––––. “The Redevelopment of Canary Wharf: 1985 to 1991.” The Institution of Structural Engineers (London) Annual Meeting (1991).

––––––––. “Exterior Wall System Review – Structural Characteristics and Inter-System Implications.” ASCE Structures Congress (1989).

––––––––, Clyde Baker, William F. Baker, S. Bucher. “Complex High-Rise Foundation and Construction.” Engineering News-Record (1988).

––––––––, William F. Baker. “AT&T-Chicago Tower Optimizes Composite System.” Engineering News-Record (1987).

––––––––. “Up-Down Construction Program at the Harbor’s Edge – Rowes Wharf-Boston.” Engineering News-Record (1985).

––––––––, Mahjoub Elnimeiri, M. Evans. “Analysis and Design of Two Cable Net/Fabric Stadiums, Case Studies.” Lightweight Structures Conference (1985).

––––––––. “Up-Down Construction Debuts in America – Olympia Centre, Chicago.” Engineering News-Record (1982).

––––––––. “Composite Structural Systems for Tall Building Structures – 3FNP Chicago.” Civil Engineering (1982).

––––––––. “Fabric Roof Speeds Up HHH Metrodome Construction Schedule.” Engineering News-Record (1981).

––––––––. “New World Regent Hotel Floats over Hong Kong Harbor Waters.” Engineering News-Record (1978).

––––––––, Clyde Baker. “Mud Flow Techniques for Earth Filling at Shatin New City, New Territories, HKCC.” Engineering News-Record (1978).

––––––––. “High Strength Concrete Arises in Hong Kong at New World Centre.” Engineering News-Record (1976).

––––––––, Jean-Ives Perez. “High Capacity Tieback Anchors for New World Centre Basement Wall.” Engineering News-Record (1975).

286

––––––––. “Reinforced Concrete Slurry Wall Comes to Hong Kong at New World Centre.” Engineering News-Record (1974).

––––––––. “Deep High Capacity Steel Piles Support First Wisconsin National Bank- Milwaukee.” Engineering News-Record (1970).

287

INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

7 North Dearborn, Chicago, Illinois 233

Amoco Building, Chicago, Illinois 244 Aqua Tower (Wave building), Chicago, Illinois 230 Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Arch, Chicago, Illinois 65, 70 Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Trading Room, Chicago, Illinois 56, 65-67 Associated Engineers 16

Baker, William (Bill) 95, 101, 171, 219, 220, 256, 258, 275 Barenboim, Daniel 203 Baxter Laboratories, Deerfield, Illinois 105 Berger, Horst 164 Block, Leigh 68-69 Broadgate Center, London, England 122, 125, 128, 173 Brunel, Isambard 103 Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 19, 20, 38-39, 220 Bu-Ali Sina, University (BASU), Hamedan, Iran 96 Bunshaft, Gordon 25, 79-80, 102, 176-178, 254 Burj Dubai (aka Burj Khalifa), Dubai, United Arab Emirates 226, 256-258, 260-263

Calatrava, Santiago 140 Calder, Alexander 76, 83-85 Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, London, England 105, 118-125, 128-129, 141, 145, 173 Canary Wharf, One Canada Square, Isle of Dogs, London, England 124 Carson Pirie Scott & Company building, Chicago, Illinois 19-20 Chagall, Marc 75-77 Charnley (now Charnley Persky) House, Chicago, Illinois 190 Chicago Bridge & Iron 8 Chicago Civic Opera, Chicago, Illinois 200-201 Chicago Civic Opera Theater Tower, Chicago, Illinois 200

288

Chicago Seven 50 Chicago Spire, Chicago, Illinois 250 Chicago Symphony Center, Chicago, Illinois 200-201 Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Station 199-200 Childs, David 32, 183-184 Cummins Engine Company, Columbus, Indiana 53

Daley, Richard J. 90, 195, 244 Daley, Richard J., Civic Center and Plaza, Chicago, Illinois 73 Daley, Richard M. (son of Richard J.) 244-245 DeStefano, James (Jim) 128 Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Virginia 36 Dunlap, William (Bill) 18, 34

Exchange House, Broadgate Center, London, England 123

First Wisconsin National Bank, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 99 Fridstein, Thomas (Tom) 128

Gehry, Frank 49 Geiger, David 164 Goldsmith, Myron 15, 19, 21, 24, 26, 32-36, 37-42, 52-56, 59, 98, 101-102, 105, 179, 189, 274 Graham, Bruce 18, 21-25, 27-30, 99-101, 103, 105-107, 109, 114-116, 118, 121-122, 124, 128, 172, 179, 190, 271, 274 Grand Hyatt Hotel, Shanghai, China 213, 228-231 Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa 61, 63 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain 50

Hajj Terminal, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 168, 172, 173 Hancock Center, Chicago, Illinois 19-21, 23, 98, 171, 217, 220, 235-236, 244, 250, 259, 260 Hartmann, William (Bill) 18, 23, 31, 73, 77, 80, 101 Harza Engineering Company 17 Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt 96

289

Hines, Gerald (Jerry) 47 Hunt, Richard 81-82 Huxtable, Ada Louise 257

IBM Building, Chicago, Illinois 243, 246-249 Inland Steel, Chicago, Illinois 19-20, 78 Institute for Architecture and Urbanism 187-193 Iyengar, Srinivasa (Hal) 9, 23, 95, 101, 123, 171-172, 258, 271, 275

Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, China 198, 200, 207-208, 211-217, 219, 224-227, 232, 235, 256-257

Kamin, Blair 245 Kennedy, John F. 13 Kenny, Lawrence, (Larry) 65 Khan, Fazlur (Faz) 9, 18, 19, 23, 28, 38, 39, 45, 95, 99-100, 103, 106, 171-172, 178-179, 187, 189, 258, 271, 275 King Abdul Aziz International Airport, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 48, 168 Kraft, Fred 18 Krainik, Ardis 202

Lippold, Richard 78 Liverpool Street Station, London, England 122 London Development Corporation, (LDC) 119-120, 123

Marina City, Chicago, Illinois 246, 248 McCormick Place II, Chicago, Illinois 101 McMath Solar Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona 32-33, 35-36, 40 Merrill, John 31-32 Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota 71, 163-171 Miami University, Museum of Art (MUMA), Oxford, Ohio 64 Midway Airport, Chicago, Illinois 83 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 15, 37, 46 Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois 50

290

Millennium Park, Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois 50

Miller, Irwin 53 Miro, Joan 73-74, 77 Morgan Stanley Headquarters, London, England 128, 145 Munse, William (Bill) 14

Netsch, Walter 18, 21-25, 28, 41, 56-60, 63, 68, 70, 85, 87, 91, 94, 96-98, 101, 177, 179, 183, 274 Newby, Frank 104 Newmark, Nathan M. 13 New World Center, Hong Kong, China 105-106, 113-115, 118, 125, 130, 172, 200, 227 Nickel, Richard 66 Noguchi, Isamu (Samu) 71-72, 79 Northwestern University, Library, Evanston, Illinois 57 Northwestern University, Lindheimer Telescope, Evanston, Illinois 41

Oak Ridge, Tennessee 32 Oltmans, Larry 94 Olympia & York 120, 122, 124, 128-129, 137 Olympia Center, Chicago, Illinois 128, 137-138, 141 Owings, Nathaniel (Nat) 31, 47

Pearl River Tower, Guangzhou, China 206, 264-266, 269 Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 235 Peck, Ralph B. 14 Pelli, Cesar 124 Philip Morris Factory, Richmond, Virginia 102 Picardi, Alfred (Al) 18-19 Picasso, Pablo 72-73, 77

Rancic, Bill 241 Ravinia Park, Murray Theater (now Martin Theater), Highland Park, Illinois 202 Republic Newspaper Plant, Columbus, Indiana 51-52, 55

291

Rowes Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts 131-135, 137, 141-145

Saarinen, Eero 37 Sarkisian, Mark 258 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 56, 58-59, 65, 68 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 23, 83-84, 98, 106, 219, 234-236, 244, 256-257, 259, 260 Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) 97 Sha Tin New Town, Sha Tin, China 113-115 Silverdome, Pontiac, Michigan 163-164 Skidmore, Louis 32 Smith, Adrian 24-25, 48, 124, 128, 131-132, 135-137, 140, 194-195, 207-209, 214, 217-218, 224- 227, 233, 235, 240, 247, 254-259, 274 Sobek, Werner 192

Tigerman, Stanley 190 Travelstead, Ware 119

Trump, Donald 233, 235-236, 240-242, 244-245, 252 Trump, Donald, Jr. (son of Donald) 252, 253 Trump Tower, Chicago, Illinois 219, 233, 235, 239-245, 250-251, 253, 255-256, 262

United States Air Force Academy Chapel, Colorado Springs, Colorado 177, 182-184, 186-187 University of Blida Campus and Hospital, Algiers, Algeria 92, 94 University of Chicago, Regenstein Library, Chicago, Illinois 56-58 University of Illinois, Chicago, Art & Architecture Building, Chicago, Illinois 86 University of Illinois, Chicago, Behavioral Science Building, Chicago, Illinois 85-86 University of Illinois, Chicago, Forum, Chicago, Illinois 87 University of Illinois, Chicago, Library, Chicago, Illinois 57-58 University of Tizi-Ouzou Campus, Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria 92

Vinci, John 65

Weese, Harry 91

292

Wells College, Aurora, Illinois 61 Wildermuth, Gordon 128 Wills Tobacco Company, Bristol, England 98 Woo, Carolina 128 World Financial Center, Shanghai, China 225, 232 World Trade Center, New York, New York 235-236 Wrigley Building, Chicago, Illinois 243, 246-248

Zils, John 275

293