Structural Integrity

The odd design came from the fact that they needed to leave space for a Lutheran Church which had a corner of the building site on 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue. The church told Citicorp they could building whatever they wanted as long as the built it around a new church, which allowed them to build around and in the airspace above.

The building's major flaw was that it could not take quartering winds (winds that come from the corners), while LeMessurier had only accounted for perpendicular winds (winds that strike the building at its face). This meant that the building was not sturdy and could quite in fact blow over in the wind. He also found that the building's mass damper, which keeps the building stable, was not working properly there would be a 1-16 chance that it would fall over.

The person who discovered this flaw was Diane Hartley who the graduate architect student that wrote about the flaw of the building as the thesis to her paper and got LeMessurier's attention to them. The story actually became public in 1995 when Joe Morganstern over heard it at a party and broke the story in the New Yorker.