Skyscrapers

SKYSCRAPERS

Quintessentially American. Perhaps no structure more clearly expressed the optimism, energy, and ambition of the American 1920s than the skyscraper. As cities boomed, so too did the number of gigantic towers, proclaiming through their often startlingly individualistic forms the power and grandeur of American endeavors in general and American business in particular. The 1920s have been called the richest era in skyscraper design, primarily because of the theatrical romanticism of the buildings that appeared during the decade. The glistening white Wrigley Building in Chicago, begun in 1921 by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White; the massive, curved-base Standard Oil Building, built by Carrère and Hastings on lower Broadway in 1926; and the ornately crowned tower—meant to suggest radio waves—of Cross and Cross's original RCA Building, erected in New York City in the late 1920s: all conveyed the imaginative spirit of the businesses that commissioned, and the architects that executed, them. By 1929 America could claim 377 skyscrapers that were greater than twenty stories high. Of the 188 that were in New York City, fifteen exceeded five hundred feet in height.

The Chicago Tribune Competition

Perhaps no event stirred more excitement in architectural circles of the decade than the competition sponsored by Col. Robert R. McCormick in 1922 for the design of a skyscraper home for his Chicago Tribune Company. McCormick offered a $50,000 first prize for a design that would be beautiful and distinctive as well as highly functional for the everyday operations of the Chicago newspaper. Some 281 drawings were submitted from around the world. A design by Gropius and another German, Adolf Meyer, combined the clean planes of Bauhaus architecture with the "solidity" of the Chicago Style of the 1880s, and a plan from Danish architect Knud Lönberg-Holm offset dark International Style rectangular towers with brightly colored, horizontally defined floors in the center of the building, an extremely avant-garde conception. Among the more eccentric submissions were a rectangular block topped by an enormous carved Indian holding a toma-hawk raised assertively above his head (by German Heinrich Mossdorf) and a huge, capped Doric column, a shockingly obvious phallic symbol (by Frenchman Adolf Loos). The winning design came from Americans John Mead Howells and Raymond M. Hood, who envisioned a Gothic tower topped by a circle of buttresses and a simple spire. Second place was taken by a last-minute entry from Finland's Eliel Saarinen, who proposed a mountainlike structure that through setbacks at various levels receded to a square, narrow, undecorated top and achieved a soaring verticality. Led by Louis Henri Sullivan, architectural critics of the day almost unanimously denounced the decision of the Tribune Tower judges. Even Hood, who seems to have been the primary formulator of the prize-winning drawing and whose reputation it launched, expressed regret that Saarinen's entry had not won. Saarinen, encouraged by his second-place finish in the competition, moved permanently to the United States, where he and his architect son Eero established substantial reputations. And the Howells-Hood Chicago Tribune Tower, completed in 1925 and so violently attacked in its own day, is now regarded as one of the handsomest Gothic landmarks in the United States.

Evolution of the Skyscraper

Although stylistic variety in American skyscrapers persisted throughout the 1920s, certain design tendencies also emerged. In the early years of the decade the rectangular corniced tower—often Gothic and sometimes incorporating several historical styles—prevailed. Lofty and romantic, it tended to invite extravagant decorative detail. Around 1924 this design began to give way to the ziggurat (a pyramidal structure created by a series of setback blocks as the building attained height). Emphasizing power and upward thrust, it normally minimized decorative detail. The ziggurat, in turn, began to surrender ground in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the slenderer, flat-roofed, horizontally defined slab that seemed more clearly to express the building's function.

American Instincts

These developments resulted in part from purely American conditions and instincts. A New York City zoning law of 1916 had limited the width of skyscrapers in an effort to ensure air circulation and light for streets below and buildings adjacent to these imposing structures. In the early 1920s, as construction of the tall buildings boomed, architect Harvey Wiley Corbett suggested that zoning requirements might be most practically met through the erection of clifflike pyramidal skyscrapers; progressively narrowing from base to crown, these towers would readily admit air and light and, to the delight of a business-driven society, would provide desirable windowed office space on the upper floors. Hugh Ferriss's extraordinary drawings of these mountainlike, soaring constructions explored the aesthetic possibilities of the ziggurat design, and among the skyscrapers that embodied it were the massive New York Telephone Company Building, also known as the Barclay-Vesey Building (Vorhees, Gmelin, and Walker,1926) and the dramatically black—and in daylight apparently windowless—American Radiator Building (Raymond Hood, 1924).

Foreign Influences

If zoning laws and American inventiveness fueled developments in skyscraper design during the 1920s, so too did influences from abroad. Hood's American Radiator Building clearly had drawn some of its inspiration—especially its use of setbacks—from the Chicago Tribune entry of Finland's Eliel Saarinen, who had already created innovative public buildings in his native land. In some of its decorative touches, the American Radiator Building joined another New York City landmark, the Chrysler Building (William Van Alen, 1930), in revealing different foreign influences—notably, those showcased by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which began in Paris in July 1925 and which supplied the name for Art Deco style. Begun in 1926 and briefly the world's tallest skyscraper, the Chrysler Building was constructed of white brick and featured gray brick trim and eagle-headed gargoylelike projections modeled on the 1929 Chrysler hood ornament; the building was topped by a series of graceful stainless-steel arches containing triangular windows and peaking in a long spire. The skyscraper's flamboyant use of color, geometric decorative devices, and disparate materials made the Chrysler Building an embodiment of Art Deco style. It was also—perhaps more significantly—an expression of American exuberance in the 1920s.

Encroaching Modernism

In comparison to the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building (begun in 1929 and completed in 1931 by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon seemed sedate, even a little boring; yet its clean lines, the vertical indentations marking its tower, and, above all, its enormous height—1,250 feet and 102 floors—gave it distinction and made it a symbol of American stability and power during the difficult Depression years of the 1930s. Two other buildings also begun in 1929 provided the first hints of a future trend in American skyscraper development, the flat-topped, rectangular slab. The McGraw-Hill Building (Raymond Hood, 1931) and the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (George Howe and William Lescaze, 1932) punctuated their slab construction with horizontal strip windows and other clear structural expressions of the buildings' functions. They thus predicted the International Style modernism that would triumph in post-Depression, post-World War II America.

Sources:

John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston: Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1961);

Paul Goidberger, The Skyscraper (New York: Knopf, 1981);

Leland M. Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Icon Editions/Harper & Row, 1979);

Louis Henri Sullivan, "The Chicago Tribune Competition," Architecturai Record, 53 (February 1923): 151-157.