The masonry facades were ultimately never built; the exposed steel towers, with their distinctive criss-crossed bracing, became one of the George Washington Bridge's most identifiable characteristics. While the exposed steel towers' design was negatively received by a few critics such as Raymond Hood and William A. Boring, the public reception at the bridge's opening was generally positive. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier wrote of the towers: "The structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh." Milton MacKaye wrote in "The New Yorker" that the George Washington Bridge had established Ammann as "one of the immortals of bridge engineering and design, a genius." After the George Washington Bridge was successfully constructed without masonry towers, Ammann did not incorporate any masonry towers in his bridge plans. Ammann wrote that the "sturdy appearance and well-balanced distribution of steel in the columns and bracing" gave the bridge's towers "a good appearance, a neat appearance".