The New York Pub­lic Library opened in 1911, an age of mag­nif­i­cence in Amer­i­can city-build­ing. Eigh­teen years before that, writes archi­tect-his­to­ri­an Witold Rybczyn­s­ki, “Chicago’s Columbian Expo­si­tion pro­vid­ed a real and well-pub­li­cized demon­stra­tion of how the unruly Amer­i­can down­town could be tamed though a part­ner­ship of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, urban land­scap­ing, and hero­ic pub­lic art.” Mod­eled after Europe’s urban civ­i­liza­tion, the “White City” built on the ground of the Columbian Expo­si­tion inspired a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can archi­tects and plan­ners includ­ing John Nolen, Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed, Jr., and John Car­rère, co-design­er of the New York Pub­lic Library.

Car­rère appears in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest tour video of the NYPL build­ing above — or at least his bust does, promi­nent­ly placed as it is on the land­ing of one of the grand stair­cas­es lead­ing up from the main entrance. The stair­cas­es are mar­ble, as is much of else; when the NYPL opened after nine years of con­struc­tion, so the tour’s nar­ra­tion informs us, it did so as the largest mar­ble-clad struc­ture in the coun­try.

On the sound­track we have not just one guide, but three: NYPL vis­i­tor vol­un­teer pro­gram man­ag­er Kei­th Glut­ting, design his­to­ri­an Judith Gura, and archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Paul Ranoga­jec. Togeth­er they tell the sto­ry of this ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can build­ing, and also point out the “hid­den details” that a vis­i­tor might not oth­er­wise notice.

Take the ter­race on which the whole build­ing stands, a fea­ture of the Euro­pean vil­la and palace tra­di­tion. Or the murals depict­ing the his­to­ry of the writ­ten word from Moses’ stone tablets on down. Or the pneu­mat­ic tubes, arti­facts of the ana­log infor­ma­tion-tech­nol­o­gy sys­tem in use before the NYPL com­put­er­ized in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. Or the ren­der­ing of the world in the library’s for­mi­da­ble map room that mis­tak­en­ly depicts Cal­i­for­nia as an island (not that every New York­er would dis­agree). The video also includes oth­er, even less­er-seen won­ders both old and new, from a 1455 Guten­berg Bible — the first in the New World — to the auto­mat­ed trol­ley sys­tem that brings books out of the stacks. But it is the build­ing itself that inspires won­der, its extrav­a­gant solid­i­ty and detail that hark back to a time of con­sen­sus, how­ev­er brief, that noth­ing was too good for ordi­nary peo­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

Watch 52,000 Books Get­ting Reshelved at The New York Pub­lic Library in a Short, Time­lapse Film

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Unveils a Cut­ting-Edge Train That Deliv­ers Books

The “Weird Objects” in the New York Pub­lic Library’s Col­lec­tions: Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Let­ter Open­er, Walt Whitman’s Hair & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When I lived in Los Ange­les, I enjoyed no break­fast spot more than Pan­n’s. The place had it all: not just sig­na­ture plates rang­ing from bis­cuits and gravy to chick­en and waf­fles, but trop­i­cal land­scap­ing, stone walls, a slant­ed roof, ban­quettes in bur­gundy and counter seats in cream, and as the pièce de résis­tance, a neon sign that lit up one let­ter at a time. Built in 1958, Pan­n’s stands today as quite pos­si­bly the most immac­u­late sur­viv­ing exam­ple of Goo­gie, a mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry aes­thet­ic that takes its name from anoth­er Los Ange­les cof­fee shop opened near­ly a decade ear­li­er. Though designed by no less seri­ous a mod­ern archi­tect than Frank Lloyd Wright pro­tégé John Laut­ner, Goo­gie’s gave rise to per­haps the least seri­ous of all archi­tec­tur­al move­ments.

“It’s a style built on exag­ger­a­tion; on dra­mat­ic angles; on plas­tic and steel and neon and wide-eyed tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mism,” writes Matt Novak at Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine. “It draws inspi­ra­tion from Space Age ideals and rock­et­ship dreams. We find Goo­gie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Nee­dle in Seat­tle, the mid-cen­tu­ry design of Disneyland’s Tomor­row­land, in Arthur Rade­baugh‘s post­war illus­tra­tions, and in count­less cof­fee shops and motels across the U.S.”

But the acknowl­edged cra­dle of Goo­gie is Los Ange­les, whose explo­sive devel­op­ment along­side that of mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can “car cul­ture” encour­aged the ultra-com­mer­cial archi­tec­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion whose first pri­or­i­ty was to catch the eye of the motorist — and ide­al­ly, the hun­gry motorist.

You can hear the his­to­ry of Goo­gie told in the Ched­dar Explain video “How Los Ange­les Got Its Icon­ic Archi­tec­ture Style,” which adapts Novak’s Smith­son­ian piece. In “Goo­gie Archi­tec­ture: From Din­ers to Donuts,” pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ahok Sin­ha goes into more detail about how the style turned “archi­tec­ture into a form of adver­tis­ing.” Like all the most effec­tive adver­tis­ing, Goo­gie drew from the zeit­geist, incor­po­rat­ing the strik­ing shapes and advanced mate­ri­als con­nect­ed in the pub­lic mind with notions of speed and tech­nol­o­gy embod­ied not just by auto­mo­biles but even more so by rock­ets. For Goo­gie was the archi­tec­ture of the Space Race: it’s no acci­dent that the cre­ators of The Jet­sons, which aired in 1962 and 1963, ren­dered all the show’s set­tings in the same style.

It could fair­ly be said that no one archi­tect invent­ed Goo­gie, that it emerged almost spon­ta­neous­ly as a prod­uct of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. But “for some rea­son, we got stuck with the name,” says archi­tect Vic­tor Newlove, of Armet Davis Newlove and Asso­ciates, in the inter­view clip above. For good rea­son, per­haps: to that fir­m’s cred­it are sev­er­al loca­tions of the din­er chains Bob’s Big Boy (where for years David Lynch’s took his dai­ly milk­shake) and Norms, both of which are still in busi­ness in Los Ange­les today. Its archi­tects Eldon Davis and Helen Liu Fong also designed Pan­n’s, which for many Goo­gie enthu­si­asts remains an unsur­pass­able achieve­ment — and one whose com­pe­ti­tion, since the moon land­ing and the end it put to not just the Space Race but the sen­si­bil­i­ty it inspired, has been dwin­dling one demo­li­tion at a time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

How David Lynch Got Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion? By Drink­ing a Milk­shake at Bob’s Big Boy, Every Sin­gle Day, for Sev­en Straight Years

How Insu­lat­ed Glass Changed Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion to the Tech­no­log­i­cal Break­through That Changed How We Live and How Our Build­ings Work

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

On Sep­tem­ber 30, 1935, a crowd of thou­sands watched as Pres­i­dent Franklin Roo­sevelt offi­cial­ly opened the Hoover Dam, the largest pub­lic works project of its time. “Approx­i­mate­ly 5 mil­lion bar­rels of cement and 45 pounds of rein­force­ment steel” went into it, History.com notes, enough to pave a four-foot-wide side­walk around the Earth at the equa­tor. The mas­sive hydro­elec­tric dam pro­vid­ed water to 7 sur­round­ing states, trans­form­ing the arid Amer­i­can West into an agri­cul­tur­al cen­ter. Cur­rent­ly, it gen­er­ates over four bil­lion kilo­watt-hours of elec­tric­i­ty per year, “enough to serve 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple,” notes PBS.

That a project this size could be com­plet­ed in just five years seems awe-inspir­ing enough. That it could be done dur­ing the worst years of the Great Depres­sion, even more so. When the dam was first pro­posed in 1922 to deal with flood­ing on the Col­orado Riv­er, the cri­sis still lay over the hori­zon.

A glo­ri­ous post-war future seemed assured, mas­ter­mind­ed by Hoover, the for­mer engi­neer. (He did not design the dam, but bro­kered the deal that pushed it through Con­gress.) Dur­ing the dam’s con­struc­tion, on the oth­er hand — a feat com­pared to build­ing the pyra­mids in Egypt — the U.S. econ­o­my had ful­ly hit rock bot­tom. Although it had been ded­i­cat­ed to Hoover by Pres­i­dent Coolidge in 1928, the Hoover Dam would­n’t come to bear his name until 1947.

In its ear­ly years, the mas­sive, smooth white con­crete curve — stretch­ing 1,244 feet across the Black Canyon on the Ari­zona-Neva­da Bor­der — was sim­ply called the Boul­der Canyon Dam. It drew some 21,000 work­ers to divert the riv­er through tun­nels, exca­vate the riverbed down to bedrock, and build the enor­mous struc­ture and its machin­ery. “Due to the strict time­frame, work­ers suf­fered from hor­ri­ble work con­di­tions in the tun­nels as the heat and car­bon monox­ide-filled air became unbear­able, lead­ing to a strike in August of 1931,” writes Alex­ia Wulff at the Cul­ture Trip.

Once they began clear­ing the blast­ed walls of the canyon, work­ers “hung from sus­pend­ed heights of 800 feet above ground — some fell to their death or were injured by the falling rock and dan­ger­ous equip­ment.” Over 100 men died in this way and such deaths, and near-miss­es, seemed com­mon­place after a while. In the TED-Ed video by Alex Gendler at the top of the post, we see one jaw-drop­ping near-miss dra­ma­tized in ani­ma­tion. “Busi­ness as usu­al,” says the nar­ra­tor. “Just anoth­er day in the con­struc­tion of the Hoover Dam.”

Learn much more about the engi­neer­ing mar­vels, and the “blood, con­crete, and dyna­mite,” as Gendler puts it, in the short B1M video fur­ther up and the full Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary just above. While it has been sur­passed in size, the Hoover Dam remains one of the largest pow­er plants in the coun­try, and may even be ide­al for use as a giant bat­tery that can store excess pow­er cre­at­ed by wind and solar. Even if that idea fails to pan out in com­ing years, the sto­ry of the dam’s con­struc­tion will keep inspir­ing engi­neers and sci­en­tists to reach for big solu­tions, even — and per­haps espe­cial­ly — in the mid­dle of a cri­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

Watch Venice’s New $7 Bil­lion Flood Defense Sys­tem in Action

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness