Part One
Why Build Tall?
Introduction
Antony Wood
As described in the introduction to this book, the typology of tall buildings has witnessed unprecedented growth and change over the past two decades. There are numerous drivers for the act of building tall, some of which have already been mentioned: land price and the desire for a greater return on financial investment; the desire for an icon to âbrandâ or promote a corporation or a city; and, increasingly, the need for denser cities as a response to climate change and for more sustainable patterns of life. Part One of this book explores these themes, focusing in more detail on the question âWhy Build Tall?â
Chapter 1, âA Brief History of the Twentieth-Century Skyscraper,â examines the development of the tall building from its beginnings in late nineteenth-century Chicago through to the start of its major export around the world a hundred or so years later. In doing so, it highlights many of the differing motivations behind the seminal buildings of the period.
Chapter 22, âAesthetics, Symbolism and Status in the Twenty-First Century,â continues the historical perspective where Chapter 1 leaves off, looking specifically at that period in the latter part of the last century and the first decade of this in which the tall building began its major shift from being mainly a North American product to proliferate in almost every major city around the world.
Chapter 3, âA Clientâs Perspective,â delivers a detailed insight into the motivations for building tall for just one client, in this case the Manitoba Hydro Electric company, with their award-winning headquarters building in Winnipeg, Canada. Here the sub-theme which underpins much of this book is introducedâhow building tall needs to embrace the best advances in sustainable design and construction and how, in doing so, it can contribute both to society and to tackling the challenges of climate change. The story of this buildingâs commissioning shows how consideration of sustainability in its widest and broadest sense influenced many of the client decisions made.
Such is the importance of the financial aspects of tall buildings that Chapter 4, âTall Building Economics,â is dedicated to the myriad complex issues surrounding this subject, taking the reader through the basics of tall building elemental costs and the drivers that influence them, as well as wider issues such as development funding and value creation.
In the final chapter of Part One, Chapter 5, âIs Refurbishment a Better Option?â a detailed review is made of the options available for existing buildings. Often the refurbishment chapter in a book like this is pushed to the end, once all the ânew-buildâ topics have been exhausted. Not so in this book. The investment in every tall building in terms of embodied energy and carbon as well as in terms of time, professional expertise and financial cost (not to mention the difficulty of demolishing them) means that refurbishment is a scenario that virtually all tall buildings will face at some point in their life cycleâmost more than once. Thus, in Chapter 5, we cover the basics of refurbishment, especially from an environmental standpoint, and examine some salient case studies.
Chapter 1
A Brief History of the Twentieth-Century Skyscraper
Gail Fenske
From the time of its appearance in the late nineteenth century, the skyscraper represented the quintessentially intractable building type. It violated with arbitrary, uncontrolled heights historical notions of urban decorum, effected congestion, polluted the atmosphere with coal burning, cast shadows, and, as an instrument of advertising, disrupted the profile views of cities. The image of the city, previously dominated by communal symbols such as a spire or a dome, fell subject to the will of an individual or enterprise.
Still, even in the nineteenth century, architects and builders showed evidence of concern for the skyscraperâs relationship to the urban environment, particularly as demonstrated by their regard for urban civility in design or for improving the public domain, whether as defined within the skyscraper itself or through its contribution to a cityâs surroundings. When the twentieth century drew to a close, the renewed interest in such a relationship distinguished designs for prominent skyscrapers around the world. The emphasis of architects and builders had shifted from the quest for height to a new set of competitive criteria, many of which were aimed at enhancing the aesthetic, spatial, and environmental experience of the skyscraper and the city.
Early Skyscrapers in Chicago and New York
The skyscraper emerged within the context of two distinctive urban environments, those of Chicago and New York. Chicago, from its founding in 1803, distinguished itself as a frontier city, the primacy of which stemmed from its geographic location astride the great waterways of the American mid-continent. The cityâs first plan of 1834, organized on a grid suggested less a community than a real estate lottery. In 1848 the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened, linking the city with the port of New Orleans, in addition to the port of New York via the Erie Canal. Shortly thereafter, the railroadsâten trunk lines converged on the city by 1856âfurther accelerated the pace of the cityâs development. By the end of the Civil War, the cityâs population had grown almost tenfold and it achieved renown as the livestock, lumber, and grain center of the world.
Founded as a Dutch trading colony in 1623, New York had risen to become by 1820 the nationâs center of banking and finance and, during the 1850s, achieved distinction as the nationâs pre-eminent importâexport center and key port of entry for European luxury commodities. In New York, commercial activity clustered around Broadway and the adjacent Ladiesâ Mile, both of which served as the settings for the ornate cast-iron framed and cast-iron embellished buildings that presaged the skyscraper. Similarly, Chicagoâs State Streetâ or âthat great street,â as it was known after the merchant Potter Palmer improved and transformed the street with his Palmer House Hotelâserved as the main axis of commercial development. Given New Yorkâs status as an importâexport center, the cityâs retailers sought distinction on Ladiesâ Mile by placing primacy on a storeâs permeability, both visually, as goods in show windows enticed passersby, and spatially, through accessibility to sidewalk crowds. In the interiors, they emphasized spectacular and luminous multi-story spaces. In service of such objectives, the new technology of iron seemed to offer limitless potentials. The most notable of New Yorkâs âcommercial palaces,â A.T. Stewartâs second store (1859â 62), illustrated the capacity of the new iron construction to alter the character of an entire urban district and to promote a new standard of urban civility (Figure 1.1).
1.1 John Kellum & Son, A.T. Stewartâs second store, New York, 1859â62, 1868
Chicagoâs Great Fire of 1871, a disaster of epic proportions, destroyed most of the buildings in the cityâs downtown, but by the early 1880s the city had begun to rise phoenix-like from the ashes to become the metropolis of the Midwest. Clearly circumscribed by the Chicago River, cable car lines, and then the elevated lines of the 1890s, Chicagoâs downtown provided little in the way of space for horizontal expansion. By the early 1880s, the profit motive of the land speculator had driven the heights of buildings skyward, creating a new âceilingâ of height in office buildings, now called âelevator buildingsâ, because builders used the elevator to provide access to upper floors.
New Yorkâs elevator buildings, which dated from the spectacular French Second Empireâstyled Equitable Life Assurance Society Building (begun 1868, enlarged 1875â76, 1886â89) designed by Arthur Gilman and George Post, stood out in their urban surroundings with showy exteriors. Elisha Graves Otis had demonstrated the first elevator in 1853, but only in the 1860s did the new technology, whether steam powered or hydraulic, reach an advanced stage of development. The Equitable featured the earliest use in an office building of two steam-powered elevators, but, more important, its post-1889 interior, as the headquarters of the worldâs wealthiest life insurance company, competed on spatial terms with Stewartâs second store: forty offices on two levels surrounded a monumental hall (Figure 1.2). The Equitable had widened the building to incorporate that interior along with an arcade of shops covered by a glass skylight, creating what contemporaries called a âmicro city.â Consequently, from the outset, fostering the quality of spatial graciousness within the urban domainâsurely directed towards clients for the Equitableâs product as well as visitorsâtook pre-eminence in certain proposals for office buildings.
1.2 Gilman & Kendall, Architects and George B. Post, Equitable Building, business hall, New York, 1889
Image: Courtesy AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company
The Western Union and Tribune companies constructed elevator buildings in the city during 1872â75 that stood out as the cityâs tallest. Both had recently risen to prestige and power in the two leading communications industries of the dayâthe telegraph (Western Union built the nationâs first telegraph line) and the newspaperâand both utilized speculative finance to ensure their prominence on the urban scene. But the Tribuneâs âmean accommodationsâ suggested little in the way of the Equitableâs enlightened approach to interior planning. Stylistically ornate and showy exteriors, moreover, achieved their effect as advertising through their very contradiction of existing conventions of urban decorum.
George Postâs New York Produce Exchange (1881â84) demonstrated that a building designed for commercial use might indeed contain an element of urban civility. Post, both an architect and an engineer, organized four stories of offices around a magnificent skylight exchange hall, utilizing âcage constructionâ for the inner court walls with the aim of opening up the entire interior to natural light. Postâs design may have inspired Burnham and Rootâs Rookery in Chicago (1885â86), one of a series of office buildings financed by Peter and Shepherd Brooks of Boston (Figure 1.3). Noted for the grace and elegance of its iron-framed light court, the Rookery introduced a new level of graciousness and urbanity into the congested and rapidly modernizing downtown. Angled, perforated wrought iron beams, ornamentation in lace-like filigree, open balconies seeming to hang in midair, and a theatrical Piranesian stair announced a new cosmopolitanism in Chicago that alluded to the newest Paris department stores, among them the Bon MarchĂ©.
1.3 Burnham and Root, Rookery, Chicago, 1885â86, interior
Image: The Rookery Building, covered court, Chicago, IL, 1885â1888. Burnham and Root, architects. From Inland Architect, Ryerson and Burnham Library Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago. © The Art Institute of Chicago
Post had experimented with cage construction in the light court of New Yorkâs Produce Exchange, but William Le Baron Jenney used the construction as a nearly complete skeleton throughout the upper stories of the Home Insurance Building in Chicago (1883â85), albeit still as a cobbled-together arrangement of cast iron columns, wrought iron box columns, and wrought ...