Architecture Unseen: Modernism in Crisis
By: Oppenheim Leung
Tags: Economy, Urban Planning, Climate Change, New York City, Architecture

Written by S.Leung and E.Oppenheim

What are the relationships between the invention of air conditioning, the world’s financial system and late-stage modernism? This historiography ceases to be clearly understood in contemporary architectural discourse. The writing presented here does not attempt to argue to restore architecture to any former state, but instead presents case studies which highlight a history dissected from the narrative of late modern architecture in the hopes of illuminating the contemporary relevance of the office tower, whose impact is correlated both directly and indirectly, to the climate emergency we face today.

The most recent climate reports are proof of the many studies and speculations leading up to the environmental problems we are confronted by in 2020. Buildings and the building construction sectors combined account for one third of the world’s energy consumption and almost 40% of total direct and indirect CO2 emissions¹. In a much more transparent, connected and information driven world, our cultural understanding of architecture is critical to addressing these concerns. A collective comprehension of the compound effects of the rise of advertising, media, and technology is key to our ability to interpret and understand the world at large. Explored in the subsequent passages are the rise of technology, the power of media and the corporation, and an omnipresent force of real estate development in Manhattan. These parameters offer a beginning point for further interrogation into the questions of building technology and architecture; why are we building glass-clad energy consuming monoliths over half a century since the inception of the first office tower?

270 Park Avenue, Union Carbide Headquarters, 1961. ‘The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space.’

In the United States during the 1970’s corporatism and capitalism were being aggressively re-defined. Corporate architecture of this era in the U.S. were no longer the automobile factories of General Motors, Ford Motors and others, but rather the contemporary symbol of technological advancement and innovation was the high-rise office tower on Park Avenue. This shift was a result of the invention of new telecommunication that allowed the office to be separate from factories and warehouses. As the telephone gained more widespread use around 1915 — instead of sending messages through mail or messenger between office and factory — morse code and the telephone, both much quicker forms of communication made transactions exponentially faster. Large corporations like Union Carbide, whose core business of petrochemical products ranging from batteries to metals to household products, maintained factory and office buildings in the midwest as well as one of the most iconic skyscrapers of 1960s, a global headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. Only a company of this scale was capable of funding such a project and required a presence in the city that was quickly becoming the center of the corporate world.

Abalos and Herreros highlight this transition towards late-modernist thinking— “For Mies and Corb, the American skyscraper was an excellent model..” for it had the “..potential to offer a symbolic interpretation of the machine.. A new city devoted to labor, shifting the center of importance of urban life toward offices and commercial activity.”² The architecture itself served as a way to communicate company values— its thin, shiny exterior was like the company itself, innovative, looking towards the future. This building was one of the first of its time, showing company strength and presence in New York City through its verticality and exterior appearance.

Despite certain losses of publicly sourced funding for New York City’s infrastructural upkeep towards the end of the 20th century, the business of private real estate development was booming. David Gissen, in his book Manhattan Atmospheres, points to this fundamental shift from early modernist planning to private enterprise, “..its earlier socionatural architectural and urban forms, water systems and parks, transformed into more explicit supports for the City’s burgeoning real-estate economy.”³ This marks a critical shift from prior visions of socionatural intervention towards gains in private equity, ultimately shaping the city in profound ways. Gissen describes here a falling out between New York City’s infrastructural vision of parks and open public space with relation to public health, and the post-industrial, post-war project of late-modern architecture. He expands upon this by observing that the corporate architecture interior, disassociated from the chaos of the city, becomes an “..antiurban analogue to the disorientations and violence of global capital.”⁴ The towers Gissen refers to are, for example, Mies’ Seagram building or perhaps the Union Carbide headquarters, designed by architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill. The Union Carbide headquarters, a 52 storey tower completed in April of 1960, was designed to accommodate the corporation’s 4000 employees dispersed across 41 vertical storeys. The office tower’s glass curtain wall and steel facade, paired with a seamlessly integrated ceiling grid, offered a vision of modernist corporate architecture. Early commercial office towers designed by SOM exemplify the increasingly popular trend of speculative real estate development emerging in the United States. Speculative real estate development being the conception of an architecture which precedes the confirmation of any one tenant, or tenants, that would claim the future leasable space, in contrast with historic precedent. In other words, floor plans designed for flexibility and unknown future programmatic requirements. A generic architecture, designed for any number of corporate clientele and possible future occupants, a critical shift in the practice of architecture.

Many of the development models we see today can be traced back to one; the Metropolitan Opera project, spearheaded in 1927 by John D. Rockefeller.⁵ This off-site office complex for the Metropolitan Opera during the Great Depression would be replicated as a speculative real estate model well into the 21st century, nearly one hundred years later. We see examples of this model today in mega-city developments whose private investments support the endless air conditioned interiors of commercial leasable office space.

Rockefeller’s office tower would galvanize generations of architects and developers, prompting the speculative design of spaces based on market fluctuation. A paradigm shift in both the financing and design of architecture. The Metropolitan Opera office building was designed by multi-architect team Reinhard & Hofmeister, Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, and Hood & Fouilhoux following the project’s conception in 1927.⁶ To facilitate the compromise of various requirements of the project, the team known as the Associated Architects looked to a tower competition held a few years prior in Chicago. Because no interior layout was requested for the competition, floor plans above ground level would receive typical layouts, omitting any form of specificity of the interior.⁷ This intentional ambiguity, designed by the architect in response to the brief, made possible the accommodation of precarious programming of future tenant occupation. This introduced for the first time the ‘typical’ office plan, one that is by nature open to accept any number of possible functional requirements, an empty vessel or envelope moulded by the aggregate influences of unpredictable market forces.⁸

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Brunswick Building, Chicago, 1962–1966. ‘Tower and Office From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice.’

Steel and concrete office towers could not exist without the advent of a novel technology, air conditioning. As the economic landscape develops in New York during the first half of the 20th century, the stock exchange becomes a surprising example of an early application of climate control. The stock exchange was the space of economic production. Traders laboured on the trading floor serving corporate clients by trading bonds with the aid of computers, also known as ‘the market’. The immense electrical load needed to satisfy both human activity and equipment demanded a controlled interior to optimize trading, and profit for corporate investors.⁹ Traders were the communication lines to a larger financial network, and became objects of value themselves. Not only were the traders on the floor expelling heat and energy, but the machines that powered these communication lines exhausted as much heat and energy converting data into monetary gain for the 1%.

Before the stock exchange began air conditioning its trading floor the technology was first used to propel production, by cooling stored objects of value, as oppose to people. Cold storage warehouses were one of the first architectural types that controlled the interior environment of a building. Here, the products of value were perishable produce, the cooled air prolonging its economic life. It may seem like a large leap from cooling perishable goods to cooling live human bodies, but both act as products worth commercial value in the post-industrial global economy. Similarly, Carrier, the world renowned air conditioning company started their business not by cooling people, but cooling machines critical for business. In 1902, Carrier’s first customer was a frustrated printer in Brooklyn whose color reproductions were failing because the humidity and temperature caused the paper to expand and contract. Carrier took off immediately afterwards coining their product as “man-made weather.”¹⁰

New York City Stock Exchange, 1920’s. ‘Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis.’

Following the stock exchange as a precedent, the mechanically conditioning interior transformed into a network of spaces for the production of capital. As the global economy extends ever further, the private office tower became a symbol of power and wealth. The city skyline represented the dynamism of American business.. and business was booming. The alignment between the technology and the big corporate clients funding these types of ambitious projects was the perfect recipe for the extreme rise of development in lower manhattan. New York City and Chicago’s skylines had “silhouettes looked a lot like the wild spikes and dives of a GDP chart…skyscrapers were the birth and growth of the office made visible.”¹¹

Battery Park landfill, mid-1970’s. ‘Manhattan Atmospheres’: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis.’

The idea of the corporate office is inextricable from notions of workplace productivity. The study of work place productivity is not new, nor news to anyone familiar with Taylorism. Popular images associated with air conditioning show seamless glass exterior panels and idealized office interiors, producing highly productive work spaces. With the added layer of scientific management, or more commonly known as Taylorism, the office became “a site of a potential utopia…where impeccably ordered rows of desks receded into the vanishing point of the horizon, where American business became inexorable, honed, and proud.”¹²

The United Nations headquarters in New York City became the ultimate icon for this type of air conditioned interior office space. “…it marked a turning point in the commercialization and integration of artificial climate control system in the skyscraper.”¹³ A tall glass tower made possible with the help and engineering of Carrier, no longer just for fruits and vegetables. Its location alongside the water deliberate, presenting the building as a beacon on the water’s shimming edge. For solar orientation however, it’s counterintuitive. It faces almost perfectly east-west with solid walls facing north and south. It is obvious that the site planning for the building was for its views, looking out towards the New York skyline, and for its object-like status along the water’s edge — a prime location for such an iconic building.

With its completion in 1952, the United Nations building was exemplary in tall office building design. It’s aesthetic, with its seamless glass curtain wall exterior and it’s weather-mastered interior by Carrier, became the standard for all future office towers. This Carrier advertisement found in Architectural Record from 1951 boasts “individual climate control in each office at the turn of a dial, return ducts eliminated..” In other words, in popular culture glass-clad building meant the assumption of a totally controlled interior environment, boosting productivity and therefore profit.

Carrier Advertisement, 1951. ‘Architectural Record.’

As the rise of the corporation lead to an increasing need for real estate, modernism as an architectural style communicated technological advancement and innovation. The Union Carbide building interior, famously photographed by artist Ezra Stoller, highlight the relentless ceiling matrix as a universally accepted corporate office aesthetic. These well known photographs became icons in themselves, as they are the documentation disseminated in popular media. This seamless aesthetic was paired with the understanding that all systems were integrated and abstracted into a new technological grid. The office became a stacked factory of production, putting capital on display across the open floor plan. This organization put the company’s value on exhibition, its employees and its efficiency the corporate entity.

Following the birth of the corporate office tower and the introduction of the mass produced family car, cities in the U.S. grew at unprecedented rates. The United States was leading the world towards a lifestyle heavily dependent on the consumption of energy. Large glass buildings became increasingly scrutinized during the energy crisis of the 1970's. High fuel costs had ramifications for architects and brought awareness to the energy use in buildings with these extensive mechanical systems. Experts began to question the logic of this construction, one which had begun dominating the landscape of modern cities. Energy consumption of towers has been well aired in recent years and subsequent decades since the invention of air conditioning. The application of glazing on every mediating surface to the outside world provided a hospitable place for the production of global capital for decades. These highly controlled interior spaces are ideal for the productive office employee to work, unhindered by changes in seasons, or even natural daylight. Today, however, a renewed focus on the energy usage of office towers comes under pressure both by climate change, and now a global pandemic rendering much of these spaces obsolete, at least for now.

More than three quarters of a century after the completion of Rockefeller Center, how do we move past an antiquated model of practice in which architecture seems to explicitly depend and take cues from? The controlled interior environments examined in this text are integral to our understanding of cities. If investment portfolios and financiers came to influence the form of New York City, how do the architect, and the citizen, respond to such forces today? Although private and public space have shape shifted since early modernity and beyond, they have of course never been stable, nor are they now, either. What we imagine to be solidified and concretized built forms are no more subject to change than the wild spikes and dives of the economic output of a society in flux. Given the myriad of critical issues we face on a global scale, can the future of cities change again, maybe this time shaped by its inhabitants rather than a conglomeration of speculative realtors, and venture capitalists?

[1] https://www.iea.org/topics/energyefficiency/buildings

[2] Abalos, Inaki, Herreros, Juan, Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice. (MIT Press: 2003), 137

[3] Gissen, David, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crisis (MIT: 2003), 8

[4] Gissen, David, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crisis (MIT: 2003), 9

[5] Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space(MIT: 2003), 87

[6] Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (MIT: 2003), 87

[7] Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (MIT: 2003), 87

[8] Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (MIT: 2003), 87

[9] Gissen, David, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crisis (MIT: 2003), 143

[10] www.williscarrier.com/timeline “Weathermakers to the World”

[11] Saval, Nikil, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014), 96

[12] Saval, Nikil, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014), 60

[13] Saval, Nikil, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014), 60