Postcards from the First Half Century€¦ · postwar skyscrapers. figure 7 Farmers Bank Building,...
Transcript of Postcards from the First Half Century€¦ · postwar skyscrapers. figure 7 Farmers Bank Building,...
Postcards from the First Half CenturyAuthor(s): John PastierReviewed work(s):Source: Design Quarterly, No. 140, Skyscraper View (1988), pp. 3-11Published by: Walker Art CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4091182 .Accessed: 15/04/2012 09:08
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John Pastier Postcards From The First Half Century
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The year I985 marked the centennial of Chicago's Home Insurance Building, generally agreed upon by historians to be the first example of America's most spectacular architectural invention, the skyscraper. In their more than one hundred year history, skyscrapers have colonized not just their own country, but much of the world. They have come to represent aspiration and greed, pragmatism and folly, poetry and banality. They have been used as offices, residences, department stores, universities, factories, hotels, libraries, communication centers, seats of government, clubs, garages, hospitals, jails, and places of worship, in either single- purpose fashion or in various functional combinations. Above all, they have proliferated.
Wave upon wave of new high rises have swallowed up the old, literally and
figuratively. Many of the pioneers, including the Home Insurance Building itself, have fallen to make room for larger successors, and most of the survivors have been dwarfed by new, taller neighbors. Like the dollar, the unit of height in a skyline has been eroded by inflation. During the first two-thirds of the skyscraper's hundred years only two cities on earth, New York and Cleveland, produced buildings as tall as 6oo
feet. Today, a generation later, there are at least thirty-three such places, and Antarctica is the only continent that isn't home to at least one of them.
Here, on postcards, are a few of the pioneers from the American skyscraper's first half century, buildings that repay attention because of their distinctiveness, their archetypical nature, their improbability, or their role as ambassadors of a golden age.
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figure 1
Lower Manhattan Skyline,
circa I9IO
Lookingfrom NewJersey, this
view shows the greatest
collection of skyscrapers that
civilization had thus far
produced. The forty-seven-
story Singer Building was the
world's tallest from 1908 to
1913. Its architect had once
vowed never to build anything
over ten floors.
figure 2
Ames Building, Boston
I892, Shepley, Rutan
& Coolidge Twelve stories may not seem
imposing today, but in the
skyscraper's infancy this and
other equally modest buildings
led conservative Bostonians to
set a 125-foot height limit on
downtown construction in
1904. Washington's
twelve-story Cairo Hotel had
shocked Congress into similar
legislation in 1899. Boston's
restrictions were eased after
about twenty-five years, and
later liberalized further, but
Washington's are still in force
today.
figure 3 Flatiron Building, Atlanta
I897, Bradford Gilbert
New York'sfamous Flatiron
Building is not the only one in
the nation; in fact, it was not
even the first. Flatirons arose
where triangular downtown
blocks and high land values
coincided, inducing builders to
make the most ofthese difficult
but desirable sites. This
bay-windowed Atlanta
specimen had counterparts in
San Francisco, Fort Worth,
Denver, Seattle, and Oakland.
figure 4
Eastern Columbia
Department Store, Los
Angeles
1929, Claude Beelman
Los Angeles was another city
with a height limit, in this case
thirteen stories and i1ofeet. (It
was rescinded in the late
195oS.) Ornamental towers
were allowed above that
height, and this one wasput to
good use as a clock tower and
signboard. Its real glory,
however, is its terra-cotta
cladding ofturquoise, gold, and
blue, just hinted at in this
atmospheric view.
figure 5
Northern Life Tower,
Seattle
1929, Albertson, Wilson &
Richardson
To accentuate the height of
their buildings, architects
sometimes used a graded color
palette, blending shades of
brick so that a structure was
dark at its base and became
gradually lighter on its upper
floors. This principle of aerial
perspective has long been a tool
used by landscape painters to
depict great distances.
j 19 'BROADAWAY"'. LOS ANGEL ES. CALIFORNIA
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figure 6
Philadelphia City Hall
I9OI, John McArthur Jr. and Thomas U. Walter
Strictly speaking, this Second
Empire style bearing-wall
tower may not be a skyscraper,
but its great height, equal to
forty or fifty stories, surely
makes it seem like one. For
over six decades this was the
tallest city hall anywhere, and
it still rules the Philadelphia
skyline due to a tradition that
no building should rise above
the base of the statue of
William Penn at its top. (This
self-restraint on the part of
local builders has since been
breached.) City Hall is also
the first high rise to boast a
Calder sculpture; William
Penn is the work ofAlexander
M. Calder, the grandfather of the creator ofthe metal stabiles
found at the foot of so many
postwar skyscrapers.
figure 7
Farmers Bank Building,
Pittsburgh
1903, Alden & Harlow Many early skyscrapers grew
by addingfloors when business
boomed and the structural
system allowed. This one
appears to have been expanded
twice, from sixteen stories to
twenty-one, and then to
twenty-four, with a heavy
cornice marking each roof line
clearly. But looks are
deceptive; it was built all at
once by designers who seemed
uncomfortable with verticality.
What results is the
architectural equivalent of a
piece ofmusic that seems to end very decisively, only to start up
again . . . andt again.
figure 8
Emerson Tower,
Baltimore
I9II, Joseph Sperry
Only in America could
architecture and advertising be
combined so directly, so
unselfronsciously, and so
startlingly. To quote the
management of this Italian
Romanesque drug factory and
office building, "the bottle on
top [is] a facsimile of the
regular 1o-cent Bromo-Seltzer
bottle, but about 10,000,000
times larger, is 51 feet high,
201/2 feet in diameter, weighs
seventeen tons, and revolves at
the rate ofl o7feetper minute.
There are 596 electric lights in
[the] bottle and crown
surmounting it, which can be
seen at a distance of twenty
miles."
figure 9
Union Central Life
Insurance Building,
Cincinnati
1913, Cass Gilbert
Union Central and the
Woolworth Building were
products of the same architect
and the same year. The
Woolworth became the tallest
building in the world, while the
grandly pyramid-capped
Union Central became the
tallest outside New York. This
latter titlepassedfrom Chicago
to Cincinnati and back to
Chicago, then to Clevelandfor a surprisingly long span, then on to Boston, and finally
returned to Chicago, which has
not only held it, but, with its Sears Tower, has even
managed to top New York.
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figure 10
L.C. Smith Tower, Seattle
1914, Gaggin & Gaggin
This optimistic and
disarmingly awkward structure
was the undertaking of a
Syracuse typewriter company,
and its extraordinary height
stemmed more from publicity considerations than practical
ones. The architects were based
in Syracuse, and clearly inexperienced in skyscraper
design. Still, the Smith Tower
has an unmistakable strength.
For half a century, it was the
tallest building in the western
half of the country, and in its
early years was higher than
anything in Chicago, the
nation's second city and
birthplace of the skyscraper.
figure 11
The Chicago Temple
1923, Holabird & Roche
Here God meets Mammon.
The first two floors are
occupied by the sanctuary ofthe
First Methodist Church, on
this corner since 1839. The
next nineteen floors are
commercial office space. Above
that is a "Sky Parsonage " and a "Sky Chapel" crowned by a
tall steeple, creating a s6g-foot
extravaganza that replaced the
Union Central Building as the
highest outside New York. It
claims to be the tallest church
in the world, raising the
possibility that the
congregation considers office work a religion.
figures 12, 13
Magnolia Petroleum
Building, Dallas
I921, Alfred C. Bossom
For about a decade, this was
the South's tallest building.
With a U-shapedfloor plan
geared to natural lighting and
ventilation, it typifies a
common early skyscraperform.
The light well is also a strong
stylistic device that breaks up the building's bulk and
emphasizes its verticality. The
architect was an Englishman
who developed a thriving
skyscraper practice in New
York, wrote a book on the
subject, then returned to
London in the 1930S and was knighted. After Mobil Oil
acquired Magnolia, the
building was topped by a red,
double-sided neon Pegasus
logo.
figure 14
Book Tower, Detroit
designed circa 1928, Louis
Kamper
The back ofthis postcard states,
"The new Book Tower
is . . . 873 feet in the air-
81 floors-the tallest building in the world. A fitting monument exemplifying the
confidence of Mr. J.B. Book,
Jr. in Detroit. " Like several
other announced super-
skyscrapers of the roaring 20S
(and like several of later
periods), this behemoth was
never built.
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figure 15 Foshay Tower,
Minneapolis
1929, Magney & Tusler The owner of this building
greatly admired the
Washington Monument, and asked his architects to adapt its tapered shape to a workable
office building. They did, producing the tallest building between Chicago and Seattle,
but the Depression left the building largely vacant and drove the patriotic Mr. Foshay
into bankruptcy and out of town.
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figure 16
Southwestern Bell
Telephone, St. Louis
1928, Mauran, Russell &
Crowell
In 1916, New Yorkpassed the
nation'sfirst major zoning law
to control the height and bulk
of skyscrapers, and to insure
minimal sunlight and air. The
higher the tower, thefarther
back it had to befrom the street.
Interpreted strictly, the law
produced wide-based structures
that stepped back in terraces as
they rose. This form, born of
local zoning and economics,
became so fashionable that it
sprang up in other places as
well. What was viewed as an
architectural restriction in New
York was seen as a role model
in other cities. The setback
style was a potent symbol of
big-city status.
figure 17
Luhrs Tower, Phoenix
1929, Trost & Trost
Here is a rare example of a
regionalist skyscraper. Its
walls are white to reflect the
desert sun, its trim green to
conjure up visions of an oasis,
and its hipped roof, not visible
in this view, is clad with
traditional red clay tile. Henry
Trost, itsprolific designer, was
active in the region for nearly
forty years, and his work
remains the finest that the
desert Southwest hasproduced.
figure 18
Bass Building, Enid,
Oklahoma
circa 1928, architect
unknown
Mini-skyscraper may sound
like a contradiction in terms,
but height is relative to context. In small cities a ten or
twelve-story building could be quite impressive, particularly if it was slender or its vertical
lines were emphasized. The
Bass Building, a seeming
hybrid of moderne and Gothic
revival styles, represents a
phenomenon that was repeated a hundredfold or more
throughout the country: it was an intimately scaled tower that
marked the center of town and
proclaimed a gentle sort of urban ambition.
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figures 19, 20
RCA Building, New York circa I933, Rockefeller Center Associated
Architects
Made up of several office
buildings, theaters,
promenades, restaurants,
shops, underground
concourses, roofgardens,
subway stations and a skating
rink, Rockefeller Center was the crowning chapter ofprewar
skyscraper design, a city ofthe
future that was actually built. Its centerpiece, the
seventy-story RCA Building, had the mostfloor space ofany office structure on earth. Inside,
Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony
Orchestra from studio 8H. Its
rooftop observatory was the
nation's most extensive; the building's length gave nearly
half a million yearly visitors ample room to stroll. Since
then, outdoor viewing decks
attracted too many suicides, and have usually been fenced in
with bars or Plexiglas, or have
been shut down entirely,
leaving the field to rotating
cocktail lounges and restaurants
where food rarely reaches the same heights as theprice or the
setting.
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