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at Lincoln Center, and I thought maybe this was one way to skin the cat. See, Paley, at one point, wanted to go with Wally Harrison. Wally Harrison--I loved him--but Wally, after he did the U.N. building, really never did a great building, in my opinion. He was mired terribly in the design of the Metropolitan Opera building.
I've forgotten what our architectural costs were. I don't want to try to even recollect them, but they were just astronomical, because the board of the Metropolitan and the committee on which I sat just could never agree on what Harrison and his colleagues came up with. I knew he wasn't the guy to do our building. Paley sort of liked him. He was on the board of Museum of Modern Art with Paley. A lovable guy. I was dead-set against it and said so. I was pushing Saarinen.
One thing Paley did agree with me on was Paley didn't want another glass box. Fortunately we coincided on that.
But that particular summer, I think, broke the cord. Or cut the cord. I did get Saarinen in, and we did do some preliminary sketches.
Cut which cord?
With the idea of getting on with it, that's all. Because we were just sitting there-- nothing go on. Oh, it was awful. I kept telling--the CBS organization knew we had the land and were saying--the key officers of the company, every time we had dinner together, would say: “What the hell's going to happen about a new building?” That was a period when everything was on the roll here, and here we were sitting on our hands.
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