Physically Impossible

That’s the north facade of 390 Fifth Avenue, the Gorham Building, at its east end where it meets the Fifth Avenue facade. It was built in 1906 and the avenue storefronts were modified in the late 1960s or early 70s.

Where the newer glass curtain wall ends, just to the left of the truck, you’ve got an impossibility if what you’re seeing is what it looks like. In theory, those two-story arches could be real and could have been removed from the avenue facade. In that case, we have (a) a quarter arch or so to the left of the last stone column and (b) nothing but the modern curtain wall to restrain the thrust from the last whole arch. Neither of these conditions makes sense or could realistically exist.

Here’s a less ridiculous possibility: the building has a steel skeleton frame and the arcades (both arches and columns) are fake, simply stone veneer hung off the steel frame. The building was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, a firm that both knew how to use modern construction technology and knew how to hide its use behind classical facades. In this scenario, there is no arch thrust because the arched stone is not a structural arch carrying load, and hanging a part of an arch is no more difficult than hanging a whole arch. Simply by acknowledging that our eyes have been tricked into believing that a heavy and complicated stone facade is a fake, a curtain wall rather than a structural wall, the impossibilities go away.

I, for one, am relieved to know that the laws of physics have not been violated.