Skyscrapers

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Skyscrapers

The "skyscraper" is a uniquely American invention that has come to symbolize the cultural and economic predominance of the United States in the twentieth century. With the invention of the elevator in 1859 and the development of new building materials and techniques, tall buildings have been occupying the heart of American cities since the late nineteenth century. They are both soaring examples of technological capability and symbols of deeper concerns. As architectural historian Carol Willis wrote in a 1995 book: "Skyscrapers are the ultimate architecture of capitalism. The first blueprint for every tall building is a balance sheet of estimated costs and returns." The modern city, center of economic activity and capital of culture, is unimaginable without skyscrapers.

While the definition of what qualifies as a skyscraper has changed over the years with increasing technological capabilities, the inherent elements remain the same as a century ago—a tall building of stacked, repetitive office spaces (and sometimes retail and/or residential spaces) located in an urban setting. In 1900, the Park Row Building in New York City was the world's tallest at 382 feet and 32 stories. Today, it would be dwarfed in most large cities. In 1997, the twin 1,476-foot Petronas Towers were completed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, surpassing Chicago's Sears Tower as the tallest occupied building in the world. The fact that they were built in Asia demonstrated the emerging economic power of the region in the late twentieth century and the exportation of American cultural symbols and economic models to all parts of the world.

The century-long evolution of the skyscraper from five-story building to 1,000-foot-plus tower was influenced by many factors. Three of the most important influences were the invention of the passenger elevator by Elisha Graves Otis in the 1850s, the development of steel framing by William LeBaron Jenney of Chicago in the 1880s, and the escalation of real estate prices in downtown areas. Other factors included stylistic trends, legislation in the form of height restrictions, and civic competition (mainly between New York and Chicago). The first identifiable skyscrapers appeared in Chicago in the 1880s. Masonry buildings, where the stone walls actually carry the weight of the building, were approaching the limits of their capacity. The 16-story Monadnock Building (1891) in Chicago remains the world's tallest masonry building; because of the load created by this height, the Monadnock's walls are six feet thick at the base. By the time of its completion, however, a totally new generation of Chicago-style skyscraper construction was in progress, led by Louis Sullivan, who wrote a famous essay in 1896 entitled "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." With the invention of the steel-frame building, in which a lightweight steel skeleton is covered by a masonry skin emphasizing their verticality, buildings could rise higher and provide more interior space while more nearly expressing the spirit of the industrial age. Such tall buildings soon appeared in New York and other cities as downtown real estate became more expensive; the only logical solution was to build upward. The steel-frame building and its derivatives proved indispensable in the development of the twentieth-century American city.

Skyscrapers embody many things, including technical achievement, economic prosperity, urban congestion, and civic and corporate pride. The extent to which the skyscraper has become an American icon demonstrates how corporate capitalism has come to represent America to the rest of the world. Tall buildings have become instantly recognizable urban symbols at home as well. They appear in countless movies and television shows, and have been the subject of paintings, poems, and musical compositions. The Empire State Building in New York, the world's tallest building for four midcentury decades (1931-1972) is one of the most famous silhouettes in the world. Skyscrapers provide an instantaneous means of identification in the modern world; they can be used as shorthand for the anonymous twentieth-century city, like the incomparable forest of tall buildings that occupy the tip of lower Manhattan. Individual buildings like the Empire State Building (1931), Chicago's Sears Tower (1974) and San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid (1972), stand as prominent civic symbols and tourist attractions, as does the RCA Building (now the GE Building) in the modern Rockefeller Center complex whose original core complex was completed in 1940. One of the most daring and atypical skyscraper designs was never realized: Frank Lloyd Wright's visionary 1930s proposal for a mile-high skyscraper rising not in a congested urban downtown but in the midst of a planned rural complex he called Broadacre City.

More important, however, is the manner in which tall buildings have been used as advertising for America's businesses. In the early 1900s, corporate capitalists discovered that the skyscraper was a more effective advertisement than any billboard, newspaper, or magazine ad. Beginning with Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building (1913) in New York—the world's tallest building at the time, designed in a striking Neo-Gothic style—skyscrapers have become indelibly linked with America's top companies. Prominent examples of the tall building as corporate symbol include the Gothic-style Chicago Tribune Tower (1922); the American Art Deco Chrysler Building (1930, New York); two International Style skyscrapers: the Seagram Building (1958, New York) and the John Hancock Center (1968, Chicago); and the postmodern AT&T Building (1984, New York). The skyscraper form proved so popular that it was also applied outside the business world. The Nebraska State Capital, designed by Bertram Goodhue and completed in 1932, combined a two-story base with a soaring 400-foot tower that copies the setback style of New York skyscrapers. The United Nations Secretariat (1950) designed by Le Corbusier, and Lakeshore Drive Apartments (1951-52), designed by Mies van der Rohe, are typical examples of a European High Modernist interpretation of an originally American architectural form; these buildings helped pave the way for the International Style "glass boxes" typically seen in mid-Manhattan and elsewhere, a style that would become pervasive in the 1950s and 1960s in many other cities of the West. Such incursions of business imagery into the political realm testify to the growing power of business in what has been called "the American Century."

Among their other functions, skyscrapers are an index to the economic health of a society. Certain "boom" periods have given rise to a proliferation of tall buildings in various cities; Chicago in the 1880s, New York in the 1920s, and Houston in the 1980s are salient examples. By the late 1990s, almost every American city of decent size has at least one tall building—even where real-estate prices do not require them. The skyscraper is a technological and economic solution to an urban problem that has been transformed into a status symbol for cities and developers alike. Because it fulfills so many functions, the skyscraper has proven to be the typical building type for the modern urban world.

—Dale Allen Gyure