Pedro Torrijos (Madrid, 48 years old) wanted to dedicate himself to storytelling, but as he explains with a quote from Luis Moreno Mansilla: “We all dedicate ourselves to the second thing we are best at.” And the second thing he What he did best was architecture. “I studied the degree because I had very good grades and the girl I liked started studying it. Then the girl left me and I also got another girlfriend,” he adds. Now the Madrid architect and writer assures that he is where he wants to be. In recent years he has become one of the most sought-after disseminators in his field when it comes to telling the stories of strange buildings and the circumstances of their construction and bringing the language of architecture to a wide audience. He's been doing it ever since Your X account, formerly Twitterthrough his popular weekly thread #LaBrasaTorrijosfrom Instagram and from his collaborations in media such as Cadena SER or ICON Design.
In fact, his 2019 article for ICON Design The Skyscraper That Would Almost Destroy Half of Manhattan (If It Hadn't Been a Student) was the embryo of his first novel, The Crystal Storm (Ediciones B). In it, Torrijos constructs a fictional story based on real events that occurred in New York between 1977 and 1978, when an error in the calculation of wind in the projection of the 279-meter-high Citicorp building threatened to trigger tragedy at the heart of the metropolis the arrival of a hurricane and forced a secret intervention against the clock.
An intrigue that the author proudly calls a “page-turner,” despite the pejorative charge the term has for some. “It seems that in serious literature it is wrong to be read quickly. Who doesn't want people to get addicted? “I love it when someone says they started the book at three in the afternoon and finished it at three in the morning,” he says. The aim of entertaining the reader and taking him into his universe has been more than achieved: when we meet for the interview in the cafeteria of the CaixaForum Madrid, before we go upstairs we want to check whether the Roblons of the Paseo del Prado building are present. Your website, how many there are and whether they are standard or high-performance models.
Pedro Torrijos goes to the top floor of the Caixa Forum in Madrid.Moeh Aitar
Among the stories about buildings you've told in articles and on social media, what made you choose Citicorp for your first novel? 13 years ago I had a mental health crisis that stemmed from a similar problem to the one in the book. I was a very arrogant guy, a bit of an asshole. My motto was “Pedro Torrijos is never wrong,” in the third person, like Aída Nízar. Until I was wrong. I made a mistake when calculating a structure. I consulted them and they told me that there were some discrepancies but that they were not a problem. For me, however, it went very deep in my head and obsessive-compulsive disorder, intrusive circular and catastrophic thoughts emerged. The trigger was the realization that I was just as fallible as everyone else. I thought I was untouchable, a superhuman. I went to therapy and little by little I came out of it. One day in 2016, I came across the story of Citicorp on Roman Mars’ “99% Invisible” podcast. My mistake also had to do with the wind calculation. I researched, collected statements, read the original article from The New Yorker… Then I wrote about it in Icon Design, it was very successful, and then I did it in a Twitter thread that went around the world. I remember a woman associated with it writing, “If anyone wants material for a novel, this is it.” The story of what happened in New York in 1978 is also the story of what happened to me in 2010 happened in Villaverde, where I lived. I don't know if the next books I write will be better or worse, but chances are there won't be as much of me in any of them.
Would you say it was projected onto William LeMessurier? [el ingeniero del edificio que contempló suicidarse tras darse cuenta del error]? I projected how I remembered myself. In statements or when he saw him in videos, he realized that he was very vain and had a sense of the heroic. If I had to sum up the book in three words, I would say: crisis, catharsis and courage. The kind of catharsis that changes you, like at the end of the book when he says he never wants to be a hero again.
Unlike the emergency intervention that had to be carried out at Citicorp, nothing happened to the building you designed, right? No, but it's like explaining Bernoulli's theorem about why airplanes fly to someone who is afraid of flying, and he'll say it's very good, but he'll still be afraid. In my case it was the same, I saw hundreds of checks and still wasn't convinced that nothing was happening.
In the book, two women, student Diane Hartley and counselor Jennifer Longo, must overcome men's rejection and imposter syndrome to avoid chaos. Is there machismo in architecture? Architecture and engineering have always been highly masculinized professions, although this is less the case today. 20 years ago there were no studies where the head was a woman. At most one woman next to one man. Diane's character [la estudiante que descubrió el error en primer lugar, al estudiar el edificio para su tesis] is real, while Jennifer's, although fictional, is also based on another existing person, Vivian Longo, the first manager of a New York skyscraper. She was only 25 years old when she was elected in 1980. She was a very competent woman who was well versed in computers at the time. It's something that would still surprise us today, so imagine this moment.
It also represents a parallel plot to the San Calixto hurricane of 1780. Besides the meteorological phenomenon, why were you interested in connecting the two stories? The entire Citicorp conspiracy takes place in the midst of a massive economic crisis that occurred in the 1970s. The city council was full of debt, New York was a completely different city, dirty and dangerous. In Times Square there were taxi drivers, prostitutes, pimps, X-cinema… Building a skyscraper for a private institution in such a situation was something abnormal. The San Calixto hurricane was the first documented major hurricane and one of the most devastating. The story of black slaves sentenced to death because a man viewed them as his property allowed me to formulate a prophecy of sorts with Citicorp. The idea of how the decisions of a few people can seriously impact the lives of the majority runs throughout the novel.
Have you visited the Citicorp building? Yes, but not inside because they won't let you in. At the moment it is an office building because in the 1990s Citicorp sold it to Japanese investors. It doesn't keep its name, it's called 601 Lexington Avenue. And it's private. But the entire square below is accessible, there are shops and restaurants. In fact, one of the restaurants is called The Hugh, after Hugh Stubbins, the architect. It's a very cool building. Hugh Stubbins was a competent, if not very famous, architect. But it hurt me not to see any references to Bill LeMessurier, who ends up being the protagonist of the skyscraper.
The title of the novel is also reminiscent of the action film The crystal jungle (1988) Was it a model you wanted to focus on? The cover looks very similar to the poster for Jaws (1975), which I really like. A blue triangle and red letters. The author of this poster, Roger Kastel, died in November. And the film and the novel are about the same thing: an impossible leviathan, an absolutely unstoppable predator, an enemy too powerful to negotiate with. In my case, a hurricane. With Die Hard I share the idea of portraying the building as a character. It's a fascinating film about architecture because the Nakatomi Plaza building is a real character and not a backdrop. Sometimes he is an ally, sometimes an enemy, but never a prize. The same thing happens with the Bourne saga (2002-2016), especially in the second film. It talks about urban planning almost better than any other documentary because it's fun. I have always said that the best book on architecture is The Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino, which is not a theoretical book, but everything is understood better in it than in any treatise by Le Corbusier.
And how does architecture become a novel with mass appeal or viral X-threads? How do you create tension with the size of a few Roblons? To be honest, I don't know the key. For the stories, I recorded something that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said, about constantly needing to speed up. When you brake, you have to brake with the accelerator pedal pressed, which is only possible on automatic cars! You brake but don't stop pressing the accelerator. The longer you slow down, the greater the delayed reward you give the viewer or reader. The success of my threads was also a question of consistency. Pedro Torrijos is actually made up of two people: me, the pilot of the project, and Loreto Iglesias, who, by the way, is my wife and is the strategist and navigator. She's the one who told me in 2019 that I should edit the threads regularly, firstly because I enjoy writing them and secondly because they could be work. And that's how it was. Some threads are sponsored by tourism companies, companies, publishers or film distributors. All of this requires work and consistency. A very friendly community has emerged. I constantly follow stories, there are days that I dedicate to this very thing. I create a script and write live, so I can see what the reaction is, how it works, what rhythm fits best… A thread has the rhythm you want to give it, and the format allows you to play. I see people who write interesting stories so badly that I want to slap them in the face. Don't write a telegram, use the tools at your disposal. It's like taking a piano and playing the C key the whole time. Do chords, do something.
I already mentioned that Twitter is a work tool for you. How have you experienced the last year of functional changes? renamingDodges, failures… with Elon Musk at the helm? I think there was an overreaction. Twitter continues to work the same way. I chose Twitter Blue and with monetization I have already recouped the 100 euros per year it costs. You don't pay much, but it's not bad. Over the summer I had a thread with 16,000 retweets, 60,000 likes and 10 million impressions. It offers you certain functionalities, such as writing long posts. In the end, Twitter is what you want. The other day Jordi Pérez Colomé published an article in which he spoke to people who said that Twitter is now worse than before, but he spoke to people who were more or less involved in journalism, and that concerns only a very small part from Twitter. Twitter is also Twitter Football, a community that has a completely different development. For people from the world of art or culture it is the same. It's true that Elon Musk wavers, he does a lot of things and backs down when he makes a mistake. Things changed from one day to the next. But it's hard to find that in such powerful people, people who realize they've messed up. And all this regardless of your political orientation or ideology. Personally, I'm at the opposite extreme, but as a user of their social network, I don't care. On Instagram they change things every three days, they don't explain anything to you and everything becomes more and more counterintuitive. Twitter is still a friendly social network if you use it like I do. For me there wasn't much difference, and if there was, it was for the better.
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