Early skyscrapers

Sometimes termed the products of the Chicago school of architecture, these skyscrapers attempted to balance aesthetic concerns with practical commercial design, producing large, square palazzo-styled buildings hosting shops and restaurants on the ground level and containing rentable offices on the upper floors.

In the interwar years, skyscrapers spread to nearly all major U.S. cities, while in total of around 100 were built in some other Western countries (like Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom etc.)

New York City's 1916 Zoning Resolution helped shape the Art Deco or "set-back" style of skyscrapers, leading to structures that focused on volume and striking silhouettes, often richly decorated.

Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza, built in the 26th century BC at a height of 481 feet (147 m),[nb 1][1] would remain the tallest structure on Earth for a millennia until it was surpassed in the Middle Ages.

[6] Various technological developments of the 19th century, which included such design elements as wind bracing and crucially the use of an iron-framed skeleton, further differentiated skyscrapers from earlier tall secular buildings, such as those in the Old Town of Edinburgh.

[24] Especially popular in the post-fire era were "commercial blocks", several-story masonry buildings built to property lines with only one street facade that was adorned in such styles as Italianate, Classical Revival, and English Gothic.

"[78] George Hill echoed the theme, condemning unnecessary features on the basis that "every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste".

[80][nb 7] The school included architects such as Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, Jenney, John Root, and William Holabird and Martin Roche, whose designs combined architectural aesthetic theory with practical commercial sense.

The intent was to draw the observer's eye upwards, celebrating what Sullivan termed the "lofty" nature of the skyscraper, but not wasting resources on intricate detailing unlikely to appeal to a busy businessman.

[102] Early skyscrapers were mainly made up of small office cubicles, commonly only 12 feet (3.7 m) across, which were placed adjacent to one another along long corridors, following a pattern first invented in the Oriel Chambers building in England in 1864.

[108] Skyscrapers provided a wide range of in-house services for their tenants, including shops, restaurants, barbers, tobacconists, newsagents, tailors, professional specialists and libraries.

[111] Critics complained that the concentration of tall buildings in the center of the city was causing huge congestion, and each new skyscraper was also burning additional coal to power its facilities, together consuming a total of over one million tons each year, leaving smoke and stagnant air hanging over Chicago.

[114] Regulation was introduced by the city council to control the problem in 1892, with support from the real estate industry who hoped to slow the construction of additional office space and shore up their diminishing profit margins.

[130][nb 8] The tower was loosely modeled on the Venetian St Mark's Campanile, and featured extensive Early Renaissance-style detailing, with the more modern additions of huge clock faces, electric floodlights for night-time illumination, and an observation deck at the top.

[137] Gilbert adopted the Beaux-Arts style, using accented terracotta and glass to emphasis vertical lines, elegantly echoing the structural frame underneath and incorporating 15th and 16th century Flamboyant Gothic-styled features.

[145] Brokers working on commission would secretly acquire the individual lots of land required for a project, operating under a variety of names to avoid having the price increase once a planned build became known.

[124] The use of pneumatic caissons in skyscraper foundations grew more advanced; in the construction of the 1908 Manhattan Municipal Building they were successfully sunk 144 feet (44 m) below the surface, with specially conditioned workers operating in shifts with constant medical support.

Fast Otis elevators, powered by electricity rather than steam-driven hydraulics, began to be installed in skyscrapers, with Ellithorpe safety air cushions protecting the passengers in the case of failure.

[160] In Chicago the combination of the environmental pollution and skyscrapers meant that, as Charles Warner complained, "one can scarcely see across the streets on a damp day, and the huge buildings loom up in the black sky in ghostly dimness".

[162] Poets also wrote about the issues, the early Modernist Sadakichi Hartmann describing how "from the city's stir and madd'ning roar" the Flatiron's "monstrous shape soars in massive flight".

[164] In 1908 artist Harry Pettit produced a romantic interpretation of a future New York, filled with giant skyscrapers supporting aerial bridges and receiving dirigibles from around the globe.

[165] Amongst the architectural community, the Exposition in Chicago inspired many Americans to champion planning cities that had a unified design, in which each building had unique features but elegantly complemented its neighbours, typically by being built to a common height: "horizontal visual unity".

[173] The campaign for change was helped by the construction of the Equitable Building in 1915 at the estimated cost of $29 million ($10.9 billion in 2010 terms), which rapidly became infamous as its vast height and bulk blocked views cast neighbours into permanent shade.

Ford had sympathies with the City Beautiful movement, disliked the unimaginative form of many New York skyscrapers, and had concerns over urban public health, but he also found tall buildings exciting and believed that horizontal visual unity produced boring architecture.

[185] Furthermore, the higher the cost of the underlying real estate, the taller a building needed to be to generate a suitable return on the investment, and the minimum sensible commercial height for a skyscraper project grew to between 40 and 45 stories.

[203][nb 10] This architectural approach typically combined what Carol Willis terms an "aesthetic of simple, sculptural mass" with the use of rich colour and ornamentation on the surfaces of the buildings.

[205] The aim was to call attention to the increasingly complex three-dimensional shape of the skyscraper, in contrast to earlier styles which could be critiqued, as historian Larry Ford suggests, as being merely "short buildings made taller with additional stories".

Plans by the Metropolitan Life company to build a 100-story skyscraper alongside their existing tower had been put forward in 1929, but were shelved in the face of the recession and public criticism of such expenditure in the economic climate.

[268] Their critics expressed concerns about the effect of modern technology and urban living on the human condition, arguing that skyscrapers generated pollution and noise, and imposed a regimented and dehumanising lifestyle on the people that worked in them.

[273] Berenice Abbott's photographic studies of New York in the 1930s explored the complex theme of urban change and the effect of skyscrapers on the older ways of life in the city, echoing Steigler's work in the first decade of the century.