The Most Dangerous Building in Manhattan

An interesting video by Veritasium about the Citicorp Center building in New York City.

Instead of hiding the building’s flaw, LeMessurier prioritized human safety over his reputation, transparently communicating the issue and collaborating on the solution.

This reminded me the modern blameless culture we find in tech companies today through post-mortems.

A fun quote from the video, after LeMessurier proposed to Stubbins to make the building’s design more complex, even if not needed:

So it’s probably the first time in history that an engineer has come to an architect and said, “Let’s make our job harder for us.”