The Rise of the Skyscraper
Daniel J. Boorstin from The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
The Rise of the Skyscraper
THE next creation of Western architecture was a new collaboration of man and the machine. For centuries Western architecture had been dominated by only two styles—the classical Greco-Roman legacy and the Gothic legacy of the Middle Ages. Modern times would add another, the joint product of architect and engineer, of the "poetry and prose" of the building arts, which allowed creators to conjure with upward space. It would come from the heart of America and would be more than a style—a design for a new kind of building. The Greco-Roman borrowed from temples, the Gothic adapted from churches. The skyscraper was created for the tall office building. Excelling all others in height, it would add a new scale and dimension to man's architectural creations. Its gesture was not to the gods, nor to God, but simply to the sky. Before the rise of the skyscraper, the American cityscape was commonly dominated by a church spire. In Lower Broadway in New York City in 1880 the tallest building was the spire of Trinity Church.
Trinity Church
Chicago was to be the birthplace, the Athens or St.-Denis, of the architecture that took businessmen into the sky, where they could look down on the steeples of their churches. And Chicago itself was a phenomenon, in the intensity, speed, and magnitude of its growth. In 1833 the city had barely acquired the 150 population required to incorporate, which fifteen years later reached 20,000, by 1870 counted more than 300,000. In 1890 its 1.1 million made it the nation's second city. A Chicago novelist declared it was "the only great city in the world to which all of the citizens have come for the avowed object of making money." "The lightning city" thrived on growth and expansion, on the movements of people and what they produced.
Focus and terminus of every then-known form of transportation, at the northern end of a canal connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River, Chicago commanded the greatest inland waterway system in the world, which the steamboat made more fluent than ever. From Chicago, a rail network reached the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts. The center for gathering, processing, and distributing the produce of a burgeoning continental-agricultural nation, for a century Chicago remained the livestock and meatpacking capital of the world. In Chicago, even before the Civil War the need for quickly built, easily demounted, and readily transported buildings had produced a bizarre architectural novelty. The widely ridiculed "balloon frame house" was displacing the traditional heavy mortise and tenon frame with lightweight planks of milled lumber quickly nailed together. Some objected that such flimsy houses would be blown away by the first wind. But in this community with few skilled carpenters and no restrictive guilds a new technology won the day. The balloon frame would house millions in American cities and suburbs to come.
Meanwhile, in the nation's largest city, New York, there was pressure to provide offices for the growing financial empires headquartered there. In the 1880s and 1890s the first tall buildings still fitted somehow into the city scene. Not until 1892 did a secular building, the 309-foot-tall Pulitzer Building, overshadow Trinity Church (284 feet). For centralized business administration, to bring businesses that dealt with one another close together, and to fit them into the congested downtown, New York builders began building tall. Elevators were necessary, but at first the public was put off by fears of falling. The ingenious Elisha Graves Otis (1811-1861), who had been working in a bedstead factory, invented a safety device that prevented the elevator from falling if the lifting chain broke. He set up his factory in Yonkers, in 1861 patented and manufactured the steam elevator, and so made the tall building convenient. These "vertical railways" were first generally used in hotels. They were the uncelebrated essential engineering feature that made possible the modern skyline.
Pulitzer Building
While adopting the new elevators New York architects still used traditional materials in the traditional way for their high buildings. What is sometimes called the first tall office building was erected (1868-70) at 120 Broadway. Though rising to a height of 130 feet, it contained only five working stories. Except for its height, there was nothing novel in its construction, which was of masonry with some brick and some wrought-iron beams in the interior. The fear of fire, which might cause the exposed metal frame to buckle and collapse, prevented the use of iron framing throughout. But new ways of fireproofing ironwork by cladding with fireproof tile as well as speedier and safer elevators encouraged more high buildings in the next five years. The Western Union Building rose to 230 feet, the Tribune Building to 260. Despite their unusual height, they still relied on masonry walls and partitions, with supporting wrought-iron beams.
Masonry, however, was ill-suited to tall buildings. The outside walls at the bottom would have to be made thicker to support the great weight of the masonry and the increasing weight of beams and floors for each added story. As a result the entrance floors to a tall masonry office building would require the lower walls of a medieval fortress. Before electric lighting, which was not practical till the 1880s, illumination was also a problem. The space allowed for windows in such structures would be more suited for shooting arrows out than for admitting sunlight, while the most valuable shop and office space near the ground would be consumed with thick masonry.
For the upreaching modern skyscraper some other kind of construction was required. New York was not to be the place. Two centuries old at the time of the Civil War, it was ancient by American standards, and had accumulated countless building regulations. Its architects, dominated by the Beaux-Arts academic tradition, imagined monuments to outshine their French or British counterparts. But Chicago was a young city bursting with new arrivals. There in 1880 the median age of architects active in designing large buildings was only thirty. More often than not they were engineers rather than architects. With few exceptions they were not infected by the Beaux-Arts tradition, and were prepared to create new structures for new needs. And the newest need was office space for expanding American enterprise in the congested city.
To these Chicago advantages an inscrutable providence added a traumatic incentive, one of the great urban catastrophes of modern times. In America, unlike the Old World, destructive catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, and invasions had not generally been required to provide a clean slate for innovation. But the Chicago fire of October 8-10, 1871, destroyed within two days much of the physical product of the city's forty years. The city had been built with no thought of fire. Even the sidewalks were of resinous pine. The cause of the great Chicago fire remains unknown, but the legend of Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocking over a lantern persists. Between nine o'clock Sunday evening, October 8, and ten-thirty the following night, three and a half square miles of the central city were burned out. Although there was a confirmed loss of only three hundred lives, eighteen thousand buildings were incinerated and one hundred thousand people were left homeless. Local moralists, comparing it with the ancient destruction of Babylon, Troy, and Rome, called it a modern apocalypse. "Very sensible men," Frederick Law Olmsted reported from the scene, "have declared . . . that it was the burning of the world." In sober fact, the catastrophic fire offered American architects an opportunity like that seized by Nero in ancient Rome.
The phoenix would become the appropriate symbol of the city, for a new Chicago arose speedily from the ashes. "Oh it was an enlivening, inspiring sight," only five months later a visitor exclaimed, "to look out each morning, upon a brave wall of solid masonry, which one had not noticed before! . . . the constant stream of vehicles that went plunging through the streets, like fire engines bent on saving a city from destruction; and, indeed, their errand was of equal moment—the building up of the New, since the Old could no longer be saved!" The speed and magnitude of the catastrophe were said to be another confirmation of the city's uniqueness. Like the settlers starting over at Plymouth Rock, they found new reason to see Chicago as the archetypal American city. Within a month, five thousand cottages were being built, and real estate prices rose above prefire levels. The stage was set for a building boom—and architectural creation—without precedent.
Chicago, the New World's new city, had become perforce a scene for the first American urban renewal. And on what a scale! Frontier engineer-architects, at home in building iron bridges, were open to new ways. Steel-frame construction, the additional element needed for the skyscraper, was created in Chicago within a dozen years after the fire. This "cage construction" had obvious essential advantages over masonry. A steel-frame skeleton supporting a tall building would not have to be thick at the base, and so would free the valuable rentable space near the ground. A conventional eleven-story masonry building required thick bearing walls at the bottom that would leave clear interior room widths of only sixteen feet. A steel frame would open up the interior of the building, regardless of its height, and at the same time would open the outer walls for large windows and natural light, which now could penetrate the interior.
The first building of true skyscraper design—or "cage construction"— the Home Insurance Company Building, was built in Chicago (1884-85) by William LeBaron Jenney (1832-1907). Major Jenney, father of the skyscraper, was a New Englander who, at seventeen, had sailed in one of his father's whalers around the Horn in 1849 to join the gold rush to California. After three years at the Lawrence Scientific School studying engineering and eighteen months in Paris studying art and architecture, he served as engineer building the trans-Panama railroad, then as engineer for General Sherman in the Civil War. After the war he settled in Chicago. The assignment that made history was his commission to design for the Home Insurance Company a fire-resistant building with the greatest number of well-lighted small offices. A piece of folklore circulated by the contractor for this building helps us understand the simple virtues of the "cage" construction. One evening, it seems, when Jenney came home depressed at his inability to solve his problem, his wife happened to be reading a heavy book. Casually putting it aside, she laid it on top of a nearby birdcage. With a Eureka flash, Jenney suddenly saw that if the flimsy wire frame of the birdcage would support a heavy book, a similar metal cage might support the weight of a tall building. By creating steel-skeleton construction he opened the era of the skyscraper.
Home Insurance Building
The nine-story Home Insurance Company Building, finished in 1885, proved that a steel skeleton could support a high structure. Architects had feared that in case of fire the different rates of thermal expansion between iron and masonry might buckle the metal and crack the masonry. And Jenney had planned to use heavy granite piers to bear some of the weight of the frame, which was to be cast-iron columns. Before these cast-iron columns were delivered, the Carnegie-Phipps Steel Company perfected a way of rolling steel columns. Jenney substituted these for the iron above the sixth floor, and so, finally, steel entered buildings. This was fifteen years after steel had been used in an American bridge. The lightness of steel compared with wall-bearing masonry, together with the new processes of riveting, opened up the building to sunlight and allowed grand increases in height. The greater strength of steel columns made it possible to space the columns farther apart inside the building, leaving the interior space flexible for movable partitions. Steel-skeleton construction where the enclosing walls had no load-bearing function would eventually make possible increasingly dramatic use of glass. The steel frame not only created an enormous new demand for steel. It allowed the architect's imagination to soar upward as well as outward. Now the sky would be the limit.
This was not the first time that Americans had added a new material for the architect. The versatile James Bogardus (1800-1874), trained as a watchmaker, improved the striking parts of clocks, devised new machines for engraving, and a metal-cased pencil that was "forever pointed." In Italy in 1840, "contemplating rich architectural designs of antiquity," he had first conceived the idea of emulating them in modern times by the use of cast iron. His own five-story factory (1850) was said to be the first complete cast-iron building in the world. He patented his "Improvements in the Methods of Constructing Iron Houses" (1850), and made whole buildings, including the frames, floors, and supports, of cast iron. Such buildings could be erected speedily at all seasons "by the most ignorant workman," could easily be taken to pieces and removed, making possible thinner walls, "fluted columns and Corinthian capitals, the most elaborate carvings, and the richest designs" at little cost. All of which "would greatly tend to elevate the public taste for the beautiful, and to purify and gratify one of the finest qualities of the human mind." Bogardus's cast-iron buildings never became popular, but his concept was prophetic. His 175-foot-high tower (1855) for the McCullough Shot and Lead Company in New York, with its octagonal cast-iron frame of true skeletal construction and nonbearing curtain walls, may have been known to Jenney.
McCullough Shot Tower
Once Jenney had shown that it could be done, many others followed. Chicago became a living museum of the new American architecture and a forum for its prophets. The most eloquent of these was Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924). Born in Boston, son of an immigrant Irish dancing master, he attended public schools. At the age of thirteen, impressed that anyone could make up a building out of his head, he decided to become an architect. At sixteen he entered the course in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned to draw, and was offered the classical orders "in a sort of misch-masch of architecture theology." He left impatiently after a year. In New York he met the famous Richard Morris Hunt, who told him that to become an architect he must go to Paris. He found employment in an architectural office in Philadelphia. When he lost this job in the disastrous panic of 1873, he joined his dancing-master father in Chicago. At the age of seventeen, he arrived there on the day before Thanksgiving, a month after the Great Fire. He found a city in ashes, and architects measuring their commissions by the mile. He later exuberantly reported his impressions:
Louis thought it all magnificent and wild: a crude extravaganza, an intoxicating rawness, a sense of big things to be done. . . . The elevated wooden sidewalks in the business district with steps at each street corner, seemed shabby and grotesque; but when Louis learned that this meant that the city had determined to raise itself three feet more out of the mud, his soul declared that this resolve meant high courage; that the idea was big; that there must be big men here. The shabby walks now became a symbol of stout hearts The pavements were vile, because hastily laid; they erupted here and there and everywhere in ooze. Most of the buildings, too, were paltry. . . . But in spite of the panic, there was stir; an energy that made him tingle to be in the game.
Young Louis found a job with the warm and generous Major Jenney, who had begun practice only five years before. "The Major was a free-and-easy cultured gentleman but not an architect except by courtesy of terms. His true profession was that of engineer."
Following Hunt's advice, after six months the restless Sullivan set off for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. To prepare himself in six weeks for the rigorous entrance examination he studied eighteen hours a day (with an hour off for exercise at the gymnasium), he wore out three successive tutors in French, engaged a tutor in mathematics, and read widely in history. The three-week-long examination—written, drawn, and oral—he passed brilliantly. To recover from the strains of the examination he went to Italy. There the high point was the two days he spent in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and so at eighteen he discovered Michelangelo, who would be his lifelong idol. "Here Louis communed in silence with a Super-Man. Here he felt and saw a great Free Spirit. Here he was filled with the awe that stills. . . . Here was power as he had seen it in the mountains, here was power as he had seen it in the prairies, in the open sky, in the great lakes stretching like a floor toward the horizon, here was the power of the forest primeval."
At the Beaux-Arts, as at MIT, the problems posed to students were purely academic, unrelated to the real world. The history of architecture taught there focused on abstractions called "styles." But Sullivan saw archi.tecture "not merely as a fixation here and there in time and place, but as a continuous outpouring never to end, from the infinite fertility of man's imagination evoked by his changing needs." And here was a clue to his principle "so broad as to admit of no exception," which became his "holy grail" for architecture.
After about a year in Paris, Sullivan returned to Chicago in 1875 seeking work as an architect. Fascinated by the great bridge recently completed (1867-74) by James B. Eads (1820-1887) across the Mississippi at St. Louis, he spent his spare time reading up on engineering, and discovered engineer heroes. When he entered the firm of Dankmar Adler in 1879, which became Adler and Sullivan in 1881, the urgent architectural problem in the congested city was how to provide light for offices and how to build higher. The new sciences of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall reinforced Sullivan's revulsion against an architecture of historic styles.
The quest for an American architecture had found a prophetic voice a half century before Sullivan. The New England sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) had scandalized patriots by his gigantic statue of a half-naked George Washington in the guise of a Roman warrior, but his plea for an "American Architecture" (1843) was acclaimed by Emerson and others. Greenough dared to mock Thomas Jefferson's use of a Roman temple as a model for an American State House. Even while the Washington Monument was being constructed he ridiculed the "palpable absurdity" of the original design, "the intermarriage of an Egyptian monument— whether astronomical, as I believe, or phallic, as contended by a Boston critic, matters not very much—with a Greek structure or one of Greek elements."
Louis Sullivan was to be the spokesman as well as the exemplar of an American architecture. The professional architects of his day, grateful legatees of Vitruvius and Suger, were sitting ducks for this Walt Whitman of the building arts:
You are ill. Your eye wanders. This is no Roman temple built by a motley crowd of organ-grinders—spook-creatures of your fertile brain—it's a bank; just a plain, ordinary, every-day American bank, full of cold hard cash and other cold things. I know all about it, I read about it in the papers. I saw it built, I know the president. . . . The Roman temple can no more exist in fact on Monroe Street, Chicago, U.S.A., than can Roman civilization exist there. Such a structure must of necessity be a simulacrum, a ghost. . . . But Roman does not mean American, never did mean American, never can mean American. Roman was Roman; American is, and is to be, American. The architect should know this without our teaching, and I suspect that he does know it very well in his unmercenary moments.
Sullivan's brief article, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," in Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896) became the manifesto of a modern and an American architecture. This was no Vitruvian Ten Orders for modern architects but an eloquent defense of what was already visible in the pioneer American skyscrapers. The word "skyscraper" had already entered the American language in a Chicago Tribune article (January 13, 1889) entitled "Chicago's Skyscrapers" to describe this new kind of tall building.
"The architects of this land and generation," Sullivan began, "are now brought face to face with something new under the sun—namely, that evolution and integration of social conditions, that special grouping of them, that results in a demand for the erection oftall office buildings." On the ground floor there must be "a main entrance that attracts the eye to its location," and spaces suitable for stores and banks, a story below ground for the services of power, heating, and lighting, and an attic space on top for the machinery of the circulatory system. Rising above the ground floor should be "an indefinite number of stories of offices piled tier upon tier, one tier just like another tier, one office just like all the other offices—an office being similar to a cell in a honey-comb, merely a compartment, nothing more. . . . We, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike." Tall buildings in New York and Chicago had been plastered with imported ornaments—classical architraves, Gothic windows and gargoyles—that bore no relation to the modern structure.
To his earthy empiricism Sullivan added "the imperative voice of emotion." "It demands of us, what is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very open organ-tone in its appeal. .. . It must be tall, every inch of it tall." Sullivan, no master of understatement, generalized his inspiring prescription for the skyscraper into a universal law.
Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.
In his wordy Whitmanesque manifesto for functionalism Sullivan exhorted American architects to "cease struggling and prattling handcuffed and vainglorious in the asylum of a foreign school" and produce a democratic art "that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the people." But the architect of the future would be tempted by "the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable."
Early skyscrapers irked city-neighbors by blocking their sunlight and their view of the heavens. The Equitable Life Building completed in 1915 at 120 Broadway in New York City covered a full block and rose without setbacks to thirty-nine stories. Its 1.2 million feet of rentable space made it the world's largest office building, but its east-west mass deprived adjacent buildings of light, and cast long, broad shadows. The neighbors' protests sparked the first zoning ordinance in the United States, in 1916, which limited a skyscraper's total floor area to twelve times the size of its plot. The Equitable had provided inside floor space more than thirty times the size of the land it covered. The perils of the skyscraper to city life were being revealed.
The American half century after the first building of true skyscraper design, William LeBaron Jenney's Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago in 1885, was one of the most productive in the history of architecture. As distinct an architectural type as the Greek temple or the Gothic cathedral, the skyscraper showed the same uncanny capacity for variation, adaptation, camouflage, and embellishment. But while those earlier types stayed on the ground and only occasionally punctuated the skyline, the skyscraper reached relentlessly upward, and created a new heaven-bound delineation for the modern city. American cities came to be identified less by their street plans than by their recently created "skylines."
The skyscraper leitmotif was elaborated in three overlapping phases: the classic, the theatrical, and the international. The classic phase appeared in the first prototypes of skeleton-frame construction in the 1880s and 1890s built in Chicago, or mostly by Chicago architects. While they overshadowed other city buildings by going up over ten stories, in silhouette they still seemed a squarish piling of story on story. The revolutionary skeleton of the Home Insurance Company Building was so well hidden that not until the original was demolished to make way for a higher building in 1931 did three expert investigating committees establish its claim to be the first building of skeleton-frame skyscraper design. Sullivan's masterpieces in this classic skyscraper style were the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (with Adler, 1891), the Chicago Stock Exchange (with Adler, 1894), the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (with Adler, 1895), and the Carson Pirie Scott store (1901-4) in Chicago.
Wainwright Building
When the leading architecture critic of the day, Montgomery Schuyler (1843-1914), assessed "The Sky-Scraper Up to Date" in 1899, he attacked American architects for aiming at all costs at "originality" instead of "shining with new grace through old forms." He reminded Americans of the enduring wisdom of Aristotle, "the father of criticism, that a work of art must have a beginning, a middle, and an end." The best skyscrapers, he noted, had followed "the Aristotelian triple division . . . the more specific analogy of the column." Just as the ancient Greek column had a base, a smooth supporting body, and a decorated capital, so the skyscraper should visibly distinguish these elements—decorated treatment on the ground floor, an ornamented cornice at the top, and in the body of the building an unbroken repetition of the "tiers of similar cells" like the column itself. Despite his protestations, Sullivan's own most esteemed early "skyscrapers" like the Wainwright Building seemed to follow this Aristotelian model.
Flatiron Building
The liberation of the American skyscraper came not in Chicago but in New York in what the architecture critic Paul Goldberger has called the "theatrical" phase. The different layouts of cities encouraged giving a different aspect to their tall buildings. The streets of recently settled Chicago had marked out symmetrical square blocks, providing sites for squat squarish buildings. But in New York the narrow crooked lanes and varied angular intersections inherited from two centuries of history gave a different challenge to its architects. "As the elephant... to the giraffe, so is the colossal business block of Chicago to the skyscraper of New York," the novelist William Archer observed. "There is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth of Chicago which is lacking in most of those which form the jagged skyline of Manhattan Island They are simply astounding manifestations of human energy and heaven-storming audacity." These dramatic architectural experiments had special appeal for Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz and their new art of photography. On the curious triangular plot (only six feet wide at its apex) at the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-third Street in 1903 rose Chicago architect Daniel Burnham's Flatiron Building, which was the subject of one of Stieglitz's most dramatic photographs. Its surrounding downdrafts added human sensations to the architectural by flapping up the petticoats of long-skirted women as they passed by. Bizarre towers rose across the city—the Metropolitan Life tower (1909) had a replica of the campanile in St. Mark's Square in Venice, while the Woolworth Building (1913), the world's tallest at the time, adapted Gothic motifs (gargoyles and all) to ornament the top of its 792 feet and even to embellish entrances of its twenty-nine speedy elevators.
Woolworth Building
Skyscraper theatrics provided a new American kind of advertisement. Across the land in the Old World big buildings had always advertised the power of prince and Church. Now skyscrapers wrote their commercial message in the sky—advertising life insurance, sewing machines, or five-and-tens. F. W. Woolworth paid $13.5 million in cash for his building, an expensive advertisement but well worth it. On April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson turned the opening switch from the White House, and the eminent Methodist clergyman S. Parkes Cadman proclaimed it "The Cathedral of Commerce," sending a brand-name message around the world. "Just as religion monopolized art and architecture during the Medieval epoch, so commerce has engrossed the United States since 1865. . . . Here, on the Island of Manhattan . . . stands a succession of buildings without precedent or peer. . . . Of these buildings, the Woolworth is Queen, acknowledged as premier by all lovers of the city .. . by those who aspire toward perfection, and by those who use visible things to obtain it."
By 1930 another theatric advertisement had overtaken the Woolworth Building. The seventy-seven-story Chrysler building, rising to 1,048 feet, was the world's tallest when completed in 1930. It also combined a romantic spire of jazzy stainless-steel arches with ornamental trim and gargoyles fashioned after the device on the hood of the 1929 Chrysler car, and earned its architect William Van Alen the sobriquet of "the Ziegfeld of the profession." It was wonderful how rapidly the skyscraper sweepstakes were lost or won. The very next year the Empire State Building rose to 102 stores and 1,200 feet. With former Governor Alfred E. Smith as the front man, it proved a better advertisement for American architecture than for the American economy. When it opened in the midst of the Depression, it had so few tenants that it was called the Empty State Building. Still, it became rich in news and folklore. In 1933 it proved a convenient perch for King Kong, who made a spectacular climb to the top. But in 1945, when a small plane rammed into its seventy-sixth floor, killing the pilot and thirteen others, some said it proved that God never intended that there should be such tall buildings.
Chrysler Building
Chicago entered the theatric sweepstakes when the Chicago Tribune Company in 1922 announced a competition for the design of its skyscraper office in the heart of the city. Of the 160 architects from all over, the competition was won by Chicago architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood with their Gothic tower crowned by a circle of buttresses. In New York's Woolworth tradition it succeeded as an advertisement for "the world's greatest newspaper" but had little influence on the future of architecture. In sharp contrast, the second-prize design by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen for a clean stepped-back central tower with no cornices or belt courses separating the floors and with no imitation of classical or Gothic themes provided the model for future American skyscrapers. "It goes freely in advance," Louis Sullivan acclaimed, "and with the steel frame as a thesis, displays a high science of design such as the world up to this day had neither known nor surmised." Saarinen immigrated to the United States to become one of the most influential city planners of the generation.
The next phase of the American skyscraper, like other triumphs of American culture, would become international. No longer in the tones of a Walt Whitmanesque muscular America, the skyscraper celebrated the technology that was bringing the world together. The provincial, rural-minded Thomas A. Edison in 1926 prophesied doom. "If. . . New York keeps on permitting the building of skyscrapers, each one having as many people as we used to have in a small city, disaster must overtake us." And Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), an American Beaux-Arts disciple, foresaw "the city of dreadful height." But on seeing the city, the bold French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier declared, "The skyscrapers of New York are too small and there are too many of them." Others, too, like Raymond Hood, saw new opportunities. "Congestion is good," he insisted, "New York is the first place in the world where a man can work within a ten-minute walk of a quarter of a million people.... Think how this expands the field from which we can choose our friends, our co-workers and contacts, how easy it is to develop a constant interchange of thought."
The flamboyant Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), from rural Wisconsin, shared Edison's fear of the congested overbuilt city. His practice had been mainly in domestic architecture, but he had been entranced by the skyscraper since his early years as apprentice to Sullivan. He let his imagination soar, offered thin-slab designs long before Rockefeller Center, pioneered in glass for tall buildings with his plan for a Luxfer Prism Skyscraper (1895), which was never built, and topped the competition with his grand solution (1956) to congestion on the ground, a Chicago Mile-High Skyscraper (never built). His tall-building designs, some said, were nothing but small Wright houses blown up to skyscraper scale. His successes would eventually be buildings of a smaller scale hugging the ground.
The later triumphs of the American skyscraper, appropriately for a nation of nations, would be called the International Style and invited architects from all over the world. Its first great monument, cleansed of classical and Gothic frippery, was Rockefeller Center. Conceived in 1927 as a new home for the Metropolitan Opera Company, its planning was interrupted by the Depression of 1929, but was carried on by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as the first great privately financed mixed-use urban project. The product (1932-40) of Raymond Hood and a team of architects, its seventy-story skyscraper, surrounded by lower buildings with an open plaza in the center, became a delightful focus of pedestrian life. The thin skyscraper slab, a dramatically simple form, did not require the setbacks customary in other tall buildings. The lower surrounding buildings and the open central plaza showed respect for community light and air and provided social amenities. For the first time it offered larger and smaller skyscrapers as a group.
Seagram Building
The International Style was dramatized again in the slender thirty-nine story slab of the United Nations Secretariat building (1952), which was created by a Rockefeller Center architect, Wallace K. Harrison, around a sketch by Le Corbusier. Its unbroken vertical line, a response to Sullivan's plea, was the vivid opposite to the theatrical Woolworth or Chrysler Building. Sheer walls of green glass faced east and west and narrower stretches of white marble rose on north and south. This International Style, so chaste in steel and glass that it could hardly be called a style, found its apostle in the colorful Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), a refugee from the German Nazis. In Chicago he made the Illinois Institute of Technology a nursery of modernism. His masterpiece in 1958, the Seagram Building at 375 Park Avenue in New York City, was a thirty-eight-story tower of bronze and glass (with no setbacks and no classic or Gothic adornment at top or bottom) set in its own inviting plaza with two fountains in the foreground and a site for an elegant restaurant in the rear. This plain tower became a prototype for Miesian architecture, a simple structure boasting its simplicity. Some critics objected that Mies was not as honest as he seemed, for his buildings really depended on hidden supports. One admirer called the Seagram Building "a beautiful lady in hidden corsets." But Miesian simplicity prevailed—in the Lever House (1952) in New York, the Inland Steel Building (1957) in Chicago by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the CBS Building (1965) by the Finnish architect Eliel's son Eero Saarinen, in I. M. Pei's John Hancock Tower in Boston (1975), in Kevin Roche's United Nations Plaza Building (1976), and in the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center (1976) in lower Manhattan, the city's tallest buildings, which added height, without adding much interest, to the skyline.
World Trade Center
Just as steel had made the skyscraper possible, now quite unpredictably the magic of glass incorporated sun and light and all surroundings into buildings in ways the Gothic acolytes could not have imagined, and added a new ambiguity to "structural honesty." The walls of windows made buildings like the Lever House look as if they were made of glass by the deceptive use of spandrel glass to cover the external steel structure between the floors. Glass, this newly versatile ancient material, brought together indoors and outdoors, with new problems of heating and cooling and extravagant demands for energy. Ironic for those who preached that "form follows function," glass varied the appearance of tall buildings without revealing their structure or function.
In architecture of all the arts it would be most difficult to abandon the secure and familiar forms in which people had lived and worshiped and been governed. But in 1890, when the Congress of the United States authorized a World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the "discovery" of America, it might have been assumed that the exposition would display the wonders of this new American architecture in its birthplace. Left to themselves Chicagoans had been bold and original. The skyscraper had already made its dramatic appearance. But, facing the Old World art world, frontier Americans became insecure and apologetic. A commission of the city's best architects and landscape designers produced a "white city" of 686 acres to be recovered from the swamps of the city's south side, embellished with lagoons. Its buildings, though newly lit by electricity, were a grandiose array of classical and neo-Renaissance designs. With twenty-eight million visitors from May through October in 1893, it would be acclaimed as the most successful and influential of all world's fairs in the United States.
The Columbian Exposition set a new fashion in urban boosterism, for it "put Chicago on the map." It was also part of the City Beautiful Movement that resulted in the invitation to Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), who was in charge of the construction in Chicago, to become a designer of the Mall in Washington, D.C., under the McMillan Plan, sponsored by Senator James McMillan of Michigan. This plan, which restored the almost forgotten L'Enfant plan of 1792, was adopted in 1901, and eventually made the capital a city of parks and vistas. So the skyscraper found its place as a separate facet of urban design alongside the "horizontal city" that preserved human scale and warmth in otherwise cold city environments.
Burnham also was the Chicago champion of the classical revival. "The influence of the Exposition," he prophesied, "will be to inspire a reversion toward the pure ideal of the ancients. We have been in an inventive period, and have had rather contempt for the classics." In this competition between the Wild West and the Cultured East, the East won hands down. The White City of columns, temple fronts, arches, and domes showed little that was Chicago American. But the only building admired abroad was Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building, not in the classical mold. Burnham's prediction was on the mark. The Exposition, displacing the fashionable Romanesque of H. H. Richardson, heralded a revival of classical forms.
Louis Sullivan, prophet of an American architecture, deplored this triumph of "good taste" and academic pallor. He stigmatized as dangerously contagious "the virus of the World's Fair." Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
. . . the architectural generation immediately succeeding the classic and Renaissance merchants are seeking to secure a special immunity from the inroads of common sense, through a process of vaccination with the lymph of every known European style, period, and accident. . . . There is now a dazzling display of merchandise, all imported. . . . We have Tudor for colleges and residences; Roman for banks, and railway stations and libraries—or Greek if you like—some customers prefer the Ionic to the Doric. We have French, English, and Italian Gothic, classic and Renaissance for churches. In fact we are prepared to satisfy, in any manner of taste. Residences we offer in Italian or Louis Quinze. We make a small charge for alterations and adaptations.
Architects, Thorstein Veblen explained, were again playing their familiar role, for "the office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent."
While Americans remained charmed by the obsolescent, Sullivan paid the prophet's price. The spectacle of the World's Columbian Exposition left him embittered, in a slough from which he never recovered. His remaining years were an undocumented nightmare, too frustrating to be recorded in his autobiography. The economic depression of 1893 made architectural commissions scarce. His longtime partner, Dankmar Adler, left him briefly in 1895 for a lucrative post with an elevator company. Then his assistant of many years left him. By 1909, desperate for lack of commissions, Sullivan had to sell his library and household effects, and then he migrated from one cheap hotel to another. In 1918 he had to give up his office in the Auditorium Tower, which had brought him fame, and move to a small office in the second floor. His marriage in 1899 had ended in separation and divorce. In 1918 he tried unsuccessfully to obtain work for the war. By 1920 he had no office, was living in one bedroom and depended on donations from friends. But he did collect his thoughts, published numerous articles, and in 1918 composed his Kindergarten Chats, a meandering Whitmanesque manifesto of American architecture, for which no publisher could be found at the time. Then he wrote his Autobiography of an Idea and collected a series of nineteen plates of his designs for ornaments, which a friend placed in his hands as he was dying in his lonely hotel room in 1924.
Daniel J. Boorstin / The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination