Skyscrapers

The elevator and the STEEL frame were the necessary technological developments for construction of the first tall office buildings, which engineers, architects, and real estate developers pioneered in New York and Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s. The conditions motivating construction of the first skyscrapers were, however, economic in nature and derived from two key trends: the phenomenal increase in city populations after the Civil War due to immigration from farms and foreign countries, and the industrialization and bureaucratization of work that concentrated more and more activities downtown. These developments increased the value of downtown land, which then stimulated an increase in the number of stories in individual buildings, tentatively in the first iron-frame structures and then decisively with the introduction of steel framing in 1888 in Chicago’s Tacoma Building.

Tall office buildings then stimulated further increases in the value of the ground under these buildings, the office rents charged within them, and the number of floors necessary to ensure profits for the developers. This continuous spiral quickly increased the height of tall office buildings from the 10-15 stories of the earliest buildings to the 20 and 30 stories more readily associated with skyscrapers, a word first used in the early 1890s. New York skyscrapers tended to emphasize the theatrical possibilities of historical, largely neoclassical forms. The major architectural firms in Chicago tended to design skyscrapers that expressed the underlying steel frame.

No sooner had the steel frame been introduced than the first race to achieve supreme height occurred in Chicago. Between 1890 and 1891 the Masons and the Odd Fellows strove to acquire not just bragging rights for owning the tallest office building in the world but also the higher rents or the greater resale value that this added prestige would bring with it. The Odd Fellows failed to get their project off the ground, so Chicago’s Masonic Temple—designed by Burnham and Root to be an innovative mixture of shops, offices, and Masonic parlors grouped around a 20-story atrium and topped by a roof garden complete with flower shows, tea service, and music recitals—became the first of the world’s tall office buildings to be highly touted as such, as well as the source for the vaunting skyscraper rhetoric that surrounded similar rivalries in the 20th century.

No matter how high they rose, however, the primary concern in first-class office buildings was to provide amenable working environments. This imperative meant maximizing the amount of natural light in all offices during a period when electric light bulbs ran on low wattages. It also meant lining the corridors and vestibules of these buildings with the mosaics, marbles, plate glass, and glazed bricks that reflected or admitted the maximum amount of natural

Photograph of the Flat Iron Building, Manhattan, and the area surrounding the junction of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The Flat Iron was completed in 1902 and was the first building in New York City with a steel frame. (Library of Congress)

Light into the offices. Light-hued luxurious materials also validated or reinforced Victorian propriety in new work situations where men and a growing number of female clerks and secretaries mixed more freely with one another than they did elsewhere.

Further reading: Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit; Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865-1913 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).