In Which We Get High And Ascend Into Nothingness

Babel's Babies

by PAUL JOHNSON

It can be argued that there was always an element of the fantastic in American architecture, even at its most (apparently) utilitarian. Nothing brings this out more clearly than the story of the skyscraper. Here is another deep and ancient human instinct: to build houses of many storeys. Some of the biggest Chinese pagodas, from the early medieval period, had ten or more levels. In fifteenth-century Italy it was the fashion, in certain cities like Bologna, to build tower-houses to celebrate family pride and overtop rivals, with the equivalent of twelve storeys.

sana'a tower houseThat was also the fashion in southern Arabia, though somewhat later. In Sana in northern Yemen, nine-storey houses were built in the seventeenth century; in Shibam there are, even today, over five hundred such tower-houses, though the highest has no more than eight storeys. The Potala Palace in Tibet has twelve storeys in some places, though they exist within the entrails of a gigantic building.

potala palaceThe term 'skyscraper' was a late-eighteenth century invention applied both to the high triangular sails on ships and to high-standing horses — Skyscraper won the Epsom Derby in 1789. Its first recorded application to a building was in 1880, when Queen Anne's Mansions were built in Westminster, ten storeys high, with perky roofs and spires, using traditional technology.

carson mansion in eureka, CAReally tall buildings, however, required three things: steel-frame construction; powered elevators and strong financial pressure to concentrate office blocks in city quarters with high rentals. That meant Chicago was, almost inevitably, the first skyscraper city, especially since, unlike its main rival for the position, St. Louis, it was outside of the swath of the Civil War. Here we come to another example, and a brilliant one, of technology creating art. The rise of Chicago was exceptional even by American standards, and right from the start, was the result of using the latest technology. In 1830 it was a fort with a few farmhouses, and a population of two hundred. At the head of Lake Michigan it was the natural entry point for the great Midwest plains, but a half-mile sandbank blocked access. Army engineers, using new digging equipment and explosives, blasted a canal through.

Two years later, a Chicagoan called George Snow invented the balloon frame. This was a house-construction system using milled lumber, quickly nailed together without need for mortice and tenon, which halved the time taken to build a house. The balloon frame plus railroads explains why, by 1848, Chicago was a first-class port handling the biggest inland-water ships in the world, with a hundred trains a day arriving on eleven different railroads. In 1856, it decided to jack itself out of the mud. Again using the latest equipment, the entire built-up town was raised 4 feet, by means of giant jacks. Briggs' hotel, made of brick, five storeys high and weighing 22,000 tons, was jacked up while continuing to function. The jacking finished, the spaces were infilled and new roads and sidewalks laid down.

The appalling Chicago fire of 1871 helped matters. Lasting 27 hours, it destroyed 17,000 buildings, a third of the total, and made 100,000 homeless. The city was then invaded by architects and engineers, who set about devising fireproof building systems. By 1874, Peter B. Wight and Sanford Loring had combined steel framing, brick flooring and cladding of terra-cotta and ceramic to make their buildings virtually proof against flames. Chicago had limitless access to land and shortage of space was never a factor in the skyscraper boom there. But accountants calculated that very tall buildings, erected in the financial-business sector of the city, could generate rents ten times higher per square foot of office space than low buildings only a few hundred yards away.

upper michigan avenue 1925Moreover, caissons developed during the national bridge-building phase of the 1860s and 1870s were discovered to be perfect for laying the foundations of immensely heavy buildings on Chicago's muddy surface. Chicago also seized eagerly on the new elevator, run first by steam, then much more efficiently by electricity. New York's Haughwout Building had put in a steam elevator in 1857, and it had come to Chicago in 1864, before the fire, in a store owned by Charles B. Farewell. By 1870 there was a hydraulic elevator, and in 1887 the first electric one. By that date Chicago had 800,000 citizens. Eight years later it had over a million, and 3,000 electric elevators, with elaborate safety devices — and in many cases with beautiful wrought-iron and brass gates, mainly in the French Second Empire mode — had been installed.

Whether New York or Chicago built the first true skyscraper need not concern us, though the title probably belongs to New York's equitable Life Assurance Company Building of 1868-70 by Arthur Delevan Gilman. It combined steel frame, the new kinds of cladding and lifts, thought it was only five storeys high (and has long since been pulled down). Far more important was the fact that Chicago produced the first skyscraper architect in Louis Sullivan. Chicago was a utilitarian city which had to make every dollar pay and looked to a 9 percent return on capital. New York was a headquarters city where prestige and self-advertisement were factors in buildings. The first Chicago building with iron pilasters, large windows and a proper skeleton facade was the Leiter Building by William Le Baron Jenney, but it was only five storeys, like the Equitable. Jenney built a ten-storey building in 1884-85 for Home Insurance, with reinforced iron frames on two facades.

Leiter buildingBuildings are not luxuries, like paintings and sculpture. They are necessities. They have to work. One of the characters of the International Modern Style was that, being highly ideological and rigid, it was also inefficient. Its buildings, conceived on the principle of functionalism, were actually dysfunctional in many cases. High-rises created crime and other social problems. Brutalist hospitals killed their patients. Such buildings also disgusted younger architects with their lack of opportunities, choice and inspiration. In 1966, Robert Venturi published an important book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which called for multiplicity and variety in the style of new buildings and answered Mies van der Rohe's fatous 'Less is more' with 'Less is bore.'

Sony Building (formerly AT & T building)In paintings, such an attack would have been severely punished; indeed, the book would have been reviewed. But Venturi's onslaught brought commissions. Clients were as bored as he was. Individuals wanted homes, not units. Corporations wanted images they could be proud of like the Chrysler or the Empire State buildings, not glass boxes. When Philip Johnson and John Burgee produced their design for AT&T's corporate headquarters in New York in 1979, its flashy classicism surmounted by a broken pediment acted like a slogan, and for the first time in the century, anti-Modernists got the publicity on their side. It would not be true to say that Modernism in architecture collapsed like a pack of cards, though some of its buildings came close to it before they were demolished. But by the 1980s it was dead.

Neuen Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart Post-Modernism in architecture took many forms. Michael Graves reintroduced colour contrasts in the Portland Building. In the Republican Bank, Johnson and Burgee reintroduced the Gothic with Baltic stepped-gables and spires in an immense tower. In the Neue Staatsgalerie, James Stirling and Michael Wilford experimented in what might be called New Mycenaean. Venturi's Sainsbury Wing for the London National Gallery was Baroque Pastiche.

Sainsbury wingSpanish architects were particularly forward in producing new stylistic exercises. At Marne-la-Vallee near Paris, Ricardo Bofill combined classicism with varieties of Baroque and even pseudo-Rococo. In the same vast development, Manuel Nunez produced immense circles, curves and arches. Santiago Calatrava reintroduced spectacular vaulting for a variety of internal purposes. Another huge 1980s-90s development, Canary Wharf in London Docklands, was predominantly Romanesque. The architects of classical Greece, ancient Egypt of the New Kingdom, Neo-Babylonia, Paleteresque and Sondergotik, Palladio and Piranesi all arose from their graves to haunt the fleeing Modernists.

Colour returned - gleaming classical white, blood-red from the hetacombs, pale green from Art Deco, the orange of the Pueblo Indians, shocking pink from the heyday of Schiaparelli and Raoul Dufy, yellows and browns of desert Islam. Much of the new architecture was silly and meretricious; much was the architectural equivalent of Pop art or Op art. But it created a multilingual hubbub — very different from the strident authoritarian monoglot monotone of International Modernism — in which creative architects of genius could find their individual voices, as they were beginning to do, in increasing numbers, by the early 21st century.

Hong Kong Shanghai BankWith the return of exuberance in building, the skyscraper tower made a dramatic comeback, not only in the United States but all over the world especially in the new economies of the Far East. Hong Kong, like Manhattan Island, was a natural skyscraper city. It grew to the skies, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the unfeatured block style of International Modernism. The seventies introduced colour and variety. In the 1980s there came revolutionary changes with the introduction not so much of Entrail architecture as of Meccano towers, in which huge steel beams on the outside provide the patterning and decoration and appear to constitute the structure — thus the 1986 Hong Kong Shanghai Bank of Norman Foster jostles for attention with its immense neighbor, the Bank of China Tower by I.M. Pei.

Meccano architecture, both in its hard-edge and rounded-edge versions, became a particular favorite in East and Southeast Asia. It was used for the immense twin towers of the Tokyo City Hall, 1992, by Kenzo Tange, a late convert to Post-Modernism, who causes a sensation when he produced his plan for what looks like an 800 foot-high metallic west front of a late-twentieth century cathedral, with square girder frames instead of spires. Nearly twice as tall were the twin Petronas Towers at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, 1,480 feet high when completed in 1996. Their Meccano serrations are rounded and there is a whiff of the pagoda about their spires.

site of Park Hyatt GuangzhouBut one of the objects in building them was to produce for Asia in general, and mighty little Malaysia in particular, the title of the world's tallest building, at least for a time. This had been held by the Sears Tower in Chicago. It is worth reminding those who think it odd that Communism should produce the world's tallest building that for decades the record for the tallest building in Europe was held by a Wedding Cake tower built in Warsaw in the 1950s. It was beaten by Norman Foster's Kommerzbank headquarters building in Frankfurt, thought its 1300 feet is comparatively low by world standards.

the never built tour sans fin in ParisGreat skyscraper towers are never built for purely commercial reasons. They advertisements, self-advertisements, corporate, personal or even national: in short, their motivation is akin to artistic; to use the current 21st century jargon, they are 'statements.' Skyscrapers are still built with essentially the same technology used in the Empire State at the end of the 1920s. But increased knowledge of how they and their materials behave, when built, enables them to creep higher and higher. As long ago as 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high skyscraper. Present towers are still less than a third that height. There is a proposal to build a Millennium Tower of ninety storeys and over 1,000 feet in London; for a Tour Sans Fin in Paris, for a Nina Tower in Hong Kong (called after the billionairess Nina Wang); and a tower in Melbourne which will be 2,250 feet high.

Planning is going ahead on buildings of up to 2,600 feet, including a tower in Tokyo in the Entrail style. These projects depend on the economic climate; the Empire State, planned just before Wall Street crash of 1929, was the last big skyscraper to be built for nearly two decades. But there can be little doubt that the mile-high skyscraper will be built during the 21st century. As is shown repeatedly in the cities of America, which has always built the best skyscrapers and grouped them profusely, a grove of varied tall buildings is one of the most exciting sights on earth. These airy and glittering city centres are perhaps the greatest achievement of twentieth-century art.

Paul Johnson is a British historian and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. You can purchase Art: A New History here.

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