Chrysler Building

All right, tonight, we have cloudy skies.

We look at Chrysler Building, dead center of the screen there.

And to the left, you can see one Vanderbilt, again, under mainly cloudy sky.

It's a muggy night.

And where did we go? We went to some art exhibit, me and the team, and this is what it was.

We went to the One Vanderbilt building, and it was the, the, the tour of the top of the building, right? And they have this line in there about the spire of One Vanderbilt, how it's a nod to the spire of the Chrysler Building next door, but the whole thing is a bunch of hoopla, and we were just looking at it.

We said, "What does this actually mean? It's a bunch of fancy words, but it doesn't mean anything." And I feel this way all the time when I read a plaque at the museum or the entry thing when you walk into an exhibit.

I'm like, th- uh, you're not telling me the thing directly.

Railroading could still belong to the future if it changed its surface, its machinery, and its relationship to the city.

In New York City, the Chrysler Building showed that the machine age had already become a public style before streamlining became a transportation doctrine.

Also completed in nineteen thirty, its stainless steel crown, hubcap-like ornaments, radiator cap imagery, and eagle forms turned automobile manufacturing into skyscraper mythology.

It did not glide like the Zephyr or the Airflow, but it made metal speed engineering and corporate spectacle look glamorous.

Four years before Chrysler tried to streamline the car body, the Chrysler Building had already prepared the public imagination for a world in which machinery could become architecture, advertising, and myth.

A century of progress did not present streamlining as an isolated style.

It made sleekness part of a total environment.

[laughs]

Canadian state TV told its reporters, "Do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks." No? Even though the very definition of terrorism is using violence against civilians to pursue ideological goals? What should we call it then? Unruly passengers? A wrong turn taken at the Chrysler Building.

Back in 2001, after the attack, I said this.

Political correctness itself is something we can no longer afford.