5 ‘Brutalist’-Like Tales of Real-Life Misery
We admire architects for one reason: Buildings are large. You might have delivered a baby today, or baked a pizza, and neither of those are half as tall as a building or even one-tenth as heavy.
But no matter how much we’d like to revere architects as the designers of the world around us, don’t count on them all living lives of glory. The men behind some of the most famous structures in world lived (and died) horribly.
The Big Ben Guy Went Insane
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That famous London clock tower next to the Palace of Westminster is named Elizabeth Tower. People are more likely to call it Big Ben, though that’s really just the name of the big bell inside it. As for why the bell is named Big Ben, no one knows. We’re fairly confident that it was named after a government employee named Benjamin Hall, but we don’t know for sure because British records in the 1850s were all written illegibly, using quills.
One person it was definitely not named for was Augustus Pugin, the man who designed the clock. Pugin also designed much of the insides of the Palace of Westminster, after the old palace burned up due to an accounting procedure gone horribly wrong. In the old days, people kept accounts using bits of wood called tally sticks, and when someone threw these sticks carelessly into a furnace one day, a fire erupted and destroyed interiors that were centuries old.
Pugin had plenty of work to be proud of. He also probably had plenty of syphilis. That would explain why, one day on a train, he suddenly started convulsing and was unable to speak.
The public did the responsible thing and locked him up in an asylum. Then, they reconsidered and locked him up in a different asylum. This second one was Bedlam, formally known as the Royal Bethlem Hospital. From inside it, he could gaze upon the nearby St. George’s Cathedral, which he had designed.
The Death of the Man Who’d Drain the Mediterranean
Architecture usually consists of designing more and more buildings for a finite amount of land. Occasionally, large-scale projects will seek to create new land, by reclaiming land from swamps or even building new islands. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel came up with the largest such plan ever devised. He would remove water from the Mediterranean Sea, exposing a quarter million square miles where people could live. That’s an area larger than the entire United Kingdom.
He dubbed the project Atlantropa, and it offered some selling points even beyond creating a nation’s worth of new Mediterranean real estate. By damming the nearby rivers, he’d divert enough fresh water to irrigate the Sahara. He’d also power a hydroelectric plant bigger than anything the world had previously considered.
No one in the relevant countries seemed interested in Sörgel’s idea, which would strand exiting waterfront property far from the newly reduced sea. They seemed even less interested in it during the 1930s and 1940s, during which everyone was reasonably skeptical of any German plan to create new living space.
Sörgel was still pushing the plan in the 1960s, right up until a car one day ran him down and killed him. The car vanished afterward, and it looked like it had to have gone out of its way to swerve and hit him. That indicated that this was murder. Clearly, this was some agent of Big Sea trying to stop his plan in its tracks.
Shot in Madison Square Garden
Stanford White designed a bunch of New York structures. He made one version of Madison Square Garden (there were three of them before our current one) and one famous bank building in the Bowery that stands out because of how grand it is (it’s on Grand Street). His most famous work is the Washington Square Arch, built to celebrate 100 years since George Washington was inaugurated as president.
When he was 46, White met a woman with a 15-year-old daughter who wanted to be a model. He pushed the girl on a swing-set that day, then he moved the family into better quarters. He later told the mother that she should go on vacation, entrusting the girl to his capable hands. The girl, Evelyn Nesbit, after a night of champagne, then woke up naked in White’s bed.
No court prosecuted White for the rape, but Evelyn went on to marry a man who heard the story and took matters into his own hands. He walked up to White and shot him three times in the head — at a performance in White’s own Madison Square Garden.
The husband would go on to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. And the performance that night tried to shrug off the interrupting incident. “Go on playing!” said the stage manager. “Bring on that chorus!”
And the musicians, though unnerved, tried their best to obey.
The Grand Cathedral Architect Was Killed and Discarded
Despite people overlooking it momentarily, White’s death was a huge deal. The death of our next architect, Antoni Gaudí, was overlooked harder. Gaudí designed Sagrada Família, a cathedral in Spain that’s been under construction for over 140 years and is still not complete.
The world experienced some turbulent times that held up progress on the cathedral, and Gaudí suffered particularly hard, losing just about everyone he knew. This led him to finally say, “My good friends are dead; I have no family and no clients, no fortune nor anything. Now I can dedicate myself entirely to the Church.” Then, one morning on the way to daily mass, he was hit by a tram.
The collision didn’t kill him instantly. If someone took him to the hospital, they could have patched him up. But they ignored him, thinking he was just a beggar instead of an important architect, so he died in the street.
If you’re thinking right now that people should have attended to an accident victim even if he were just a beggar, you wouldn’t fit in well at all in 1926 Barcelona.
The Man Behind the Sydney Opera House Never Got to See It
Some 11 million people visit the Sydney Opera House every year. Far more than that see the building from the outside, because anyone who goes to Sydney has to at least get a glimpse at it. Take a photo anywhere in the city, and it may materialize in the background on its own. A.I. does this, automatically.
One man who never saw the building in person was Jørn Utzon, the architect who designed it. Utzon won a competition to build the proposed structure, basing its look on the sections of an orange. He worked on it for five years from his home in Denmark, then he moved to Sydney to oversee construction. But the project went overbudget, and the government stopped paying him. So, he said, “To hell with this,” and took off.
He moved to Hawaii and then Switzerland. Apparently, they did send him an invitation to come to the building’s opening, but he didn’t come. He also never returned to Australia at all. Decades passed. His eyesight failed. Then he finally died, an old man in his bed, never once having looked at his finished creation.
At least we can say he was never obsessed with his work. Maybe we should all aspire to that level of not-give-a-fuck-itude.
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