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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