Both share the name of an automobile manufacturer.

The Cord Building would appear to be the Chrysler Building. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie Towers ( model, rendering). Another possible inspiration is Wright's equally unbuilt St. Sadly, this Enright House at 80 South Street remains unbuilt. While its individual gallery blocks attached to a service core may have given Ayn Rand the idea of 'each a single house held to the other houses like a single crystal to the side of a rock,' sans Roark they still look a lot like a 'pile of cages.' Recently, Santiago Calatrava infused the design with some Roark quality when he adapted it into an apartment tower much like the Enright House. 115).įor a glimpse of a very rudimentary Enright House, you can look at the 1930 Howe & Lescaze design for the Museum of Modern Art. 119).Īccording to her, Roark's low-slung Stoddard Temple is based on Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois (p. Heller concurs and adds that it too was the result of a public competition (p. The Cosmo-Slotnick Building on Broadway, 'a skyscraper to house a motion-picture theater and forty floors of offices,' no doubt was Ayn Rand's take on the 1927 Paramount Building on Times Square, a 3,600-seat theater fronted by a thirty-three-floor office building in shape of a giant desk clock. Just a few blocks away, by the way, is Stanton Street. … With this building, Sullivan revolutionized the way architects think about tall buildings.' In her Ayn Rand biography, Anne Heller concurs and adds that Rand likely named the building in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana House in Springfield, Illinois (pp. Its 'curtain wall of terra cotta that expresses the inner steel skeleton was a radical departure from the heavy masonry of building in this period. The thirteen-story Bayard-Condict Building at 65 Bleecker Street is the only building in New York by Louis Sullivan, the inspiration for Henry Cameron. Plus: 'At the time of construction, the pyramid was the tallest tower at the tip of Manhattan and was illuminated as a beacon for ships entering the harbor.'Ī little more than 'hree blocks east of the Frink National Bank' - in fact, more like thirty blocks north of 14 Wall Street - stands the real-life Dana Building, its lines 'hard and simple, revealing, emphasizing the harmony of the steel skeleton within.' It is more than just some stories lower, though. Of course it's not a bank building, but like 14 Wall Street it is topped by a pyramid modeled on the Mausoleum of Mausolus. The Stanton Institute of Technology? Like Guy Francon, he later studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.įinally, while the tip of 14 Wall Street functions as nothing but a lowly smokestack, Trowbridge & Livingston's Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh, another replica of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (like one copy wasn't bad enough), is topped by a locally famous beacon.Īnother candidate is 26 Broadway, the old Standard Oil Building. That would make 14 Wall Street's architects, Trowbridge & Livingston, Francon & Heyer, right? Well, Samuel Beck Parkman Trowbridge studied at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

'Sources for the design included the Ionic order on the Erechtheum at the Acropolis, ancient Macedonian prototypes, and reconstruction drawings of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the model for the stepped-pyramid temple which crowns the building, giving it its distinctive profile against the skyline.' (Opens PDF) What's more, it's as eclectically Greek as the Frink National Bank Building is Roman: Like the Frink National Bank Building, which was apparently among the tallest buildings Downtown, the Bankers Trust Building at 14 Wall Street was among the three tallest buildings in the city when it opened in 1912. Yet, there is a bank building topped by a copy of what put the 'Mausol' in mausoleum, the original Mausoleum of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, twenty-nine floors above the pavements. Read The Fountainhead, been to New York, bought the centennial edition? But did you ever wonder which real buildings may have inspired the steel and concrete stars of The Fountainhead?Īs for that hideous Frink National Bank Building, I know of no building in New York City 'on the top of which, twenty-five floors above the pavements, there burned in a miniature replica of the Hadrian Mausoleum a wind-blown torch made of glass and the best General Electric bulbs.' (Lucky me.) A guide to Howard Roark's Manhattan as built in steel and dreams.

Frink national bank building new york