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American Radiator Building

A print depicting the uppermost section of the American Radiator Building at night. It is created in strong black and white tones. The background is solid black. The building is grey in the lower portion, with light seemingly streaming from the windows. The upper portion seems infused with bright white light.

Richard Haas, born 1936
American Radiator Building, 2005
Etching
20" × 16"
Private collection

Hood’s new client realized that for a company selling furnaces and heaters, “a building that glowed in the dark was not such a wild idea.” Raymond Hood worked with Broadway lighting designer Bassett Jones to try out different lighting schemes before eventually settling on fifty-six amber floodlighting units, from the twenty-first floor upwards.

The public was mesmerized. “The gilded upper portion seems miraculously suspended one and two hundred feet in the air,” a critic noted, “the design has a dreamlike beauty.”