Following the failure of his first design, Wright agreed to retool, and on January 4, 1948, officials of the Allegheny Conference visited Wright's studio at Taliesin West to hear him present a new scheme. The major building from the original design was replaced by a tower called the Bastion, which was to be 1000 feet (300 m) tall. Two cable-stayed bridges across the Allegheny and Monongahela emerged from the arrowhead-shaped structure, which would contain a large traffic interchange. The pavilion at the Point was retained, and the outline of the original megastructure became a circular promenade.
The central tower offered a viewing platform and included a television and radio antenna. It would have been equipped to project light and sound spectacles, like the tower in the original scheme. Levine asserts that the Bastion would have provided Pittsburgh a structure similar to the Eiffel Tower, both an observation tower and a landmark symbol of the city, but Robert Alberts notes that "such viewing towers make sense in a city built on a flat terrain, but Pittsburgh already had a high view from a nearby mountain top".[16]
The two bridges were a remarkable engineering aspect of the project, as the stayed-cable design they employed was only just coming into vogue in the post-World War II era. Further, the bridges were to be built using segments of pre-stressed concrete, another emerging technology.[17] The expertise for the innovative bridge concepts found in both schemes probably came from Czech engineer Jaroslav Polivka, whom Wright had hired to assist in calculations for the Guggenheim Museum.[18] The next year, Wright and Polivka together drew up plans for a concrete bridge across San Francisco Bay.Chalkboard underkläder
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