![]() ![]() “He got to the fourth floor and he said one thing, a short sentence: ‘This is far too nice for an electronics firm.’ And everything came to a screeching halt.” ĭesigned to accommodate 7,000 aerospace employees, after the acquisition by Rockwell the building sat empty for several years. “The chairman of the board came to take a tour,” Morris said of a 1969 visit to the building. William “Art” Morris, a corporate architect for North American, who contributed to the building's design, told the Orange County Register in 1993 that the building was deemed too fanciful for the defense contractor. The company had a large building without enough work to support staff there. There are a couple of accounts as to why this happened: The more common story is that as the Vietnam War wound down, Rockwell's defense contract with the federal government fell through. But, Rockwell never occupied the building. The building's construction was undertaken at a transformative time in the defense industry: while it was still under construction, North American Aviation merged with Rockwell International, a manufacturing conglomerate that worked in the defense and space industries. Construction took nearly three years, and in 1971 the building was completed. North American Aviation wanted an area that would be private and secure. The site was chosen in part because, in the mid-1960s, it was a very quiet area of southern Orange County. The building is located in the heart of a shallow valley surrounded by the San Joaquin Hills. The building was originally constructed in 1968 for North American Aviation, a defense and aerospace industries manufacturer, to house the company's corporate offices on the top floors and an electronics manufacturing plant on the bottom two floors. The unusual form refers to ziggurats, ancient Mesopotamian temples. The building was designed by William Pereira, who developed a stepped pyramid silhouette that is rare in American architecture. ![]() Primary tenants are now regional offices of the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service. National Archives and Records Administration had holdings for the Pacific region stored here, but has since moved to another location. Since 1974 it has been owned and managed by the General Services Administration. It was built between 19 for North American Aviation/ Rockwell International, and designed by William Pereira. The Chet Holifield Federal Building, colloquially known as "the Ziggurat Building", is a United States government building in Laguna Niguel, California. This aspect of Babylonian cosmology is echoed in the Biblical story, where the builders say "let us build a tower whose top may reach unto heaven". Here, a straight line connected earth and heaven. The Etemenanki was next to the Esagila, and this means that the temple tower was erected at the center of the world, as the axis of the universe. After he had killed her, he brought order to the cosmos, built the Esagila sanctuary, which was the center of the new world, and created humankind. According to the Babylonian creation epic Enûma êliš the god Marduk defended the other gods against the diabolical monster Tiamat. The most famous ziggurat is, of course, the "tower of Babel" mentioned in the Biblical book Genesis: a description of the Etemenanki of Babylon. By building ziggurats, the king showed that he could perform more impressive religious deeds than the priesthood. In third millennium BCE Mesopotamia, there was a conflict between the two great organizations, the temple and the palace. Archaeologists have discovered nineteen of these buildings in sixteen cities the existence of another ten is known from literary sources. Ziggurats played a role in the cults of many cities in ancient Mesopotamia. The best preserved temple tower is at Choga Zanbil in Elam, modern Khuzestan in Iran. ![]() Even larger was the shrine of the god Anu at Uruk, built in the third or second century BCE. The temple tower known as Etemenanki (the 'House of the foundation of heaven on earth') in Babylon was 92 meters high. Our word ziggurat is derived from ziqqurratu, which can be translated as "rising building" (Akkadian zaqâru, "to rise high"). But there are two differences: a ziggurat was not a tomb but a temple, and ziggurats were built well into the Seleucid age, whereas the building of pyramids came to an end after c.1640 BCE. Ziggurats are, architecturally, the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids: large artificial square mountains of stone. Ziggurat: a multi-storied temple tower from ancient Mesopotamia. ![]()
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