Today I Learned

You have to keep the timing and context in place. It was the mid-50s, the economy was roaring, and they finally invented a way to hang walls and windows off of the structure itself, the curtain wall. This gave way to the International Style, which actually has some interesting and lovely buildings, but many of them look like gross sterile cubes, and they loved that at the time. Ornate buildings like the gothic skyscrapers (we adore so much today) were suddenly seen as old and dirty and dilapidated, giant sheets of glass were "the future," sterile and gleaming and just unlike anything else, at such a massive scale. And of course so much cheaper than masonry buildings with complex upper floors and decorations, and faster, you could throw them up very quickly.

Of course after 70 years of this we've got a lot different impression. If I were old-money wealthy I'd definitely have a penthouse in one of the old gothic towers, with the outdoor gardens under archways. I don't even care what city.

Maybe they look better on the inside, I don't know much about them (and 2 of the 3 I can't exactly visit now). But yeah, I hate ugly buildings. I feel like architects have somewhat of a moral imperative to make sky scrapers beautiful and free of advertisements and company logos. If you wanna slap some tacky logo on your building at ground level, I'm more okay with it (or at least not radically opposed) but skylines should be beautiful.

Also, downtown Tulsa is super cool. Sweet Art Deco everywhere (we had oil money when the Depression was raging). Wasn't any nightlife when I was a teen, but it's lit now!

Worked there a bit in '98! It was sweet then, can't imagine how cool it is now.

It's open to the public, AFAIK, always was. Everything above the 3rd floor or so is just typical office space, though I'll bet there's some cool one's in there now.

your username should be PleaseLetMeIn instead

I live here so don't hate on it so much.