Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913
By Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit
Yale University Press, 496 pages, $50
With its narrow street canyons set between massive cliffs of stone, New York has always seemed more the result of cataclysmic natural forces than a creation of man. In “Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913,” Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit excavate the genesis of those Promethean forms over a century ago. Both art historians, the authors have written about New York architecture before, but Condit remains best known for his seminal book “The Chicago School of Architecture,” which documents the technical advances that made Chicago’s early architectural developments possible.
Landau and Condit provide comprehensive coverage of almost every tall structure built in New York during this period. They describe the financial interests involved, structural systems employed, various attendant mechanical, electrical and plumbing conveniences derived, as well as the architect’s aesthetic inventions. Extensive quotations from the business prospectus for each building and contemporary critical commentary offer multiple perspectives on the structure’s intent and accomplishment. This approach recognizes the myriad forces that impact architectural design and allows the reader to consider all the relevant determinants of architectural form.
While they are quick to agree with the self-promoting comments of architects and builders, Landau and Condit tend to be dismissive of the critics. At the turn of the century, the authors write, criticism “continued to be largely negative, much of it aimed at `superficial’ and historicist design and cheap, fast construction. The voluble adverse commentary of nineteenth-century observers deserves a major share of the blame for the negative attitude toward post-1850 architecture that persisted until the 1960s.” But a careful look at the book’s abundant photographs reveals mostly stale, historically derived designs, and it’s hard to believe that expedient construction wasn’t a factor in the wholesale demolition of the same.
It’s hardly news to cite New York as home to the first skyscraper, long credited to the Equitable Building (designed and constructed from 1868-70). But Chicago clearly provided the most fertile ground for the skyscraper’s development, especially during the last two decades of the 19th Century. Such New York architects as George B. Post and Richard Morris Hunt, while hardly unknown to architectural historians, hold no place in the public’s imagination like Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham, the men whose designs helped make Chicago a center for architectural achievement after the devastating 1871 fire. The Rookery’s bright and airy court, the Monadnock’s bold sculptural expression, and the Reliance Building’s soaring glassy walls all set standards that no New York building of their period could match.
Landau and Condit often quibble over Chicago’s role in the early development and refinement of the high-rise building. They suggest that a second-story skylit “business hall” in the Equitable Building “anticipated the galleried light courts of early Chicago skyscrapers.” In describing Hunt’s proposals for several buildings, they argue that his drawings “presage the design scheme made famous by (H.H.) Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store.” Several well-known Chicago architects began their careers in New York. They include P.B. Wight, who employed Burnham and John Wellborn Root prior to their establishing their own office; Charles B. Atwood, who designed the Reliance Building; and Frederick P. Dinkelberg, who designed the Flatiron Building. Landau and Condit would have us believe that these Chicagoans’ New York connections somehow elevate New York architecture at the expense of Chicago.
The many ungainly and unsightly structures shown here are a reminder of just how unusual and difficult a design problem the tall commercial building posed to architects in the latter half of the 19th Century. At its worst it is a mongrel breed, and it took enormous vision and talent to develop what Sullivan described as “a proud and soaring thing.” In fact, it still does, and it’s no accident that the heavy, dull and historically referential work shown here reminds us of many Postmodern grotesqueries so recently built around the world.
“Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913” does fill a historical void. This is the first extensive treatment given to the tall buildings in New York during the period between the previously acknowledged “first” skyscraper of the late 1860s and those grand achievements of the Metropolitan Life, Municipal and Woolworth Buildings, all constructed just prior to World War I. But most of the work in between is rather lackluster and uninteresting. While New York architects struggled mightily with the artistic demands of this new building type, others elsewhere, particularly in Chicago, were doing it better.
