THERE it stands, the world’s most famous skyscraper. Overlooking the Kips Bay neighborhood, named for Dutchman Jaap Kip who once had a farm there. Connects to the Murray Hill neighborhood that for the longest time was better known as Engelenburg, in honor of a similar piece of land near the Dutch town of Zutphen, now Engelenburg Castle. Around the corner: the Moooi exclusive design store that Casper Vissers put up there.
The Empire State Building.
Designed by architect Howard Frank Vanderbeck. The firm he worked for always gets all the glory, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. But Willie Lamb knew what he was doing when he brought in his friend Howie and made him a partner. Earlier, they had interned together elsewhere.
VANDERBECK, a descendant from the Van der Beek and Schouten families of Amsterdam, helped solve the problem of the foundation for the Empire State Building, very simply. He designed the building not from below, but from above. As everyone knows, by using the profile of a pencil as an example. That way he obtained exactly the right base surface.
Vanderbeck’s building became world famous, he himself anonymous. There is not even a photograph of him. On his gravestone in Valhalla, just outside the city, they couldn’t even spell Frank’s initial right.
In 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers compiled a list of seven wonders of the world. Two of the seven: the Dutch Delta Works, and Howard Vanderbeck’s Empire State Building.
