The Concrete Bungle

"The engineers from HNTB wanted to put it where it is now," Kerr recalls.

HNTB is unable to rebut Kerr's claim. A spokeswoman for the firm says all the people who worked on the project are dead. Founded in 1914, HNTB was first known for bridge design. Working for another firm, Ernst Howard -- the H in HNTB -- had been the principal engineer of the Innercity Viaduct, which opened in 1906. Howard and Henry Tammen (the T) later designed the innovative Armour-Swift-Burlington Bridge, which carried automobiles and railroads on separate decks; using telescopelike hangers, the bridge could be raised to accommodate riverboats.

HNTB's business changed with the times. During World War II, the firm designed a prisoner-of-war camp in Concordia, Kansas. Later it won an assignment to build the Miami International Airport.

The partners worked diligently. In a note to a partner in 1953, Howard approved of a suggestion to hold a business conference "of all partners with wives" for a week or several days. "I have long been convinced that we are the hardest working firm that could be found, and have been so intense that we seem to have a guilty feeling if we take an ordinary vacation," Howard wrote, according to company history published in 1989. "We may be overlooking the fact that our lives are going on and we are living today, and will not be living at some future distant time."

Three months later, Howard suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting at his desk in the firm's offices at 1801 Grand. He was 73 years old.

Howard had lived long enough to see HNTB land one of its most significant jobs: designing the Maine Turnpike.

Its first segment opened in 1947, putting HNTB in an excellent position for the road-construction boom soon to follow. Enoch Needles (the N) was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956.

Like the rest of the nation, the maker of stately bridges grew infatuated with the automobile and how best to move it from point A to point B. Looking at pictures in the company history, there's a striking contrast between the bridges, several of them postcard-worthy, and the freeways. The graceful Mississippi River Bridge in Dubuque, Iowa, and the chaotic three-level, five-interchange Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx in New York City appear to have been conceived by members of different species.

HNTB's principal highwayman was R.N. Bergendoff (the B), a Nebraskan who bore a passing resemblance to Jimmy Hoffa. In 1972, when the expressway system was nearly complete -- a $143 million job --Bergendoff wrote a piece for The Kansas City Star that talked about the city not in terms of its people or its places but its ability to transport things. Bergendoff believed that Kansas City held advantages over cities located on the coasts and the Great Lakes because waterfront cities "serve only 180-degree trade territory."

It was as if he were writing a new slogan for the metro: Kansas City -- Happy to Be America's Truck Stop.

Last year, HNTB announced revenues of nearly $500 million. The firm has managed to prosper, despite its penchant for offering dubious ideas -- some of which eventually got built -- over the years.

HNTB Architecture often gets credit for the famed designs of Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums. In fact, Colorado architect Charles Deaton conceived the innovative two-stadium concept. Deaton worked on the project with the Kansas City architecture firm Kivett & Myers, which HNTB acquired in 1975 -- three years after Arrowhead's dedication. (It was the first to open for play.)

If Jackson County had taken HNTB's suggestion, Kansas City sports fans might have been stuck with a dome.

In 1966, HNTB and the engineering firms Black & Veatch and Burns & McDonnell submitted a design for a domed stadium that could accommodate baseball and football. Several such multipurpose stadiums -- covered and uncovered -- were built during this period. Most cities that built them -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati -- came to regret the decision and later replaced their circular structures with sport-specific stadiums like Arrowhead and Kauffman.

Another HNTB proposal from the mid-1960s would have plunked a shopping mall along the southern edge of downtown. Working with Stan Durwood, the late chairman of the AMC theater chain, HNTB imagined Crosstown Center as a multiblock shopping, office and entertainment complex.

In the abstract, Crosstown Center is similar to the entertainment district under development today on those same blocks. The modern one, though, at least purports to have an urban feel. Crosstown Center was essentially a shiny slab of suburbia. HNTB's brochure shows shoppers, lifted safely above the streets by skywalks, enjoying "the ideal climate" of an enclosed center.

Crosstown Center was never built, though elements of it made their way into the Town Pavilion and 1201 Walnut, postmodern glass-and-steel skyscrapers that HNTB designed in the 1980s. Like Crosstown Center, the buildings look inward, buffering visitors with third-level food courts. At street level, the buildings turn a cold shoulder. The black marble walls of 1201 Walnut are especially menacing to passing pedestrians.

HNTB Architecture also choreographed the 1990s expansion of Bartle Hall, which added a conference center and stretched the exhibit hall to span I-670. Although it was a neat engineering trick, the expansion, which cost $144 million, did nothing to make people want to be downtown. "Nobody considered when Bartle was expanded how the street experience should work," Daniel Serda complains.