ARTSQUEST CENTER AT STEELSTACKS

摘要

Joseph biondo, aia, principal at Spillman Farmer Architects, was born and raised in the firm's hometown of Bethlehem, Pa. The one-time hotbed of U.S. manufacturing was an industrial dynamo in Biondo's youth, and he remembers well the masses of black smoke that issued from the mighty blast furnaces at the heart of the Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s vast compound on the Lehigh River. "When I was a kid," Biondo says, "I thought those smokestacks made the clouds." Nowadays, Bethlehem is out of the cloud-making business: the plant ceased operations in 1995. But the impressive hulks of the old steelworks remain, monuments to an America that Walter Gropius called the "Mutterland der Industrie.'