Skyscrapers
Authors: Fenske Gail 
Published: February 2020

Our knowledge of the skyscraper as a building type is based on research exploring the type’s many facets, among them architectural, technological, and urban. In history, the question of a single definitive “first skyscraper” was debated throughout the 20th century. More recently, historians have asked: Is the type’s defining feature the technology of metal skeleton construction? If so, that places its origins in Chicago in the 1880s with the Home Insurance Building, Tacoma Building, Masonic Temple, and Reliance Building. Or is it simply “height”? That would place its origins in New York City during the late 1860s to mid-1870s with the Equitable, Western Union, and Tribune Buildings, both of which utilized elevator technology to attain height. A complete definition of the skyscraper, however, encompasses several key technologies. Making structures habitable for work or living, for example, required mechanical and electrical systems—initially plumbing, heating, and illumination, and later air conditioning. Within the city, a vast transportation infrastructure by rail facilitated movement to and from the skyscrapers of the central business district. Throughout history, the architecture of the skyscraper has illustrated aspects of American economic, political, and cultural change. The earliest skyscrapers in New York, the nation’s corporate headquarters, for example, recalled the towers of preindustrial Europe, and thus served as memorable landmarks, as demonstrated by the Woolworth Building, whereas those of Chicago, an entrepôt with an entrepreneurial business culture, exemplified the organic-functionalist theories of John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, as realized in the Monadnock and Wainwright Buildings. During the 1920s, the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago inflected forms prescribed by zoning legislation, creating an urban vernacular specific to each city. New York’s 1916 ordinance engendered the setback skyscraper and its associated urbanism, with the Empire State Building as classic example, whereas Chicago’s comparable but unique 1923 code led to a “city of towers,” as illustrated by the Carbide and Carbon and Mather towers. The “Art Deco” and “skyscraper Gothic” idioms, best represented in the Chrysler Building and Chicago’s Tribune Tower, inspired exterior and interior ornamental schemes. The skyscrapers of the 1950s, by contrast, crystallized the “international style” in a society economically prosperous, consumer-oriented, and dominated by corporate enterprise, as superbly represented in the Lever House, New York. During the late 1960s and 1970s, technological optimism and ambition spurred the innovative and supertall Sears (Willis) Tower and the World Trade Center, which redefined the skylines of Chicago and New York, respectively, utilizing the structurally unprecedented braced tube technology to achieve new heights. The World Trade Center’s large-scale reconfiguration of the city’s fabric exemplified the day’s urban renewal schemes. Recent skyscrapers, including the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, now vigorously compete for height while participating in a global system of signification, in which they gesture toward sustainability, but above all else advertise modernity and economic vitality.