Structural Integrity

Citicorp center had to be built on columns in the center instead of the corners because a church was standing where a corner of the building was supposed to be. They decided to build around the church. The building’s major flaws were the fact that the exoskeleton was too light, and the columns were unstable. The quarterly winds could have blown the building away. An undergrad student named Diane Lee Hartley discovered the flaw and told the junior staffers at Citicorp. Morgenstern broke the story with the New Yorker in 1995.