page_title: Early skyscrapers
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Early skyscrapers / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: West Street Building
context_page_description: The early skyscrapers were a range of tall commercial buildings built between 1884 and 1945, predominantly in the American cities of New York City and Chicago. Cities in the United States were traditionally made up of low-rise buildings, but significant economic growth after the Civil War and increasingly intensive use of urban land encouraged the development of taller buildings beginning in the 1870s. Technological improvements enabled the construction of fireproofed iron-framed structures with deep foundations, equipped with new inventions such as the elevator and electric lighting. These made it both technically and commercially viable to build a new class of taller buildings, the first of which, Chicago's 138-foot tall Home Insurance Building, opened in 1885. Their numbers grew rapidly, and by 1888 they were being labelled skyscrapers.
  Chicago initially led the way in skyscraper design, with many constructed in the center of the financial district during the late 1880s and early 1890s.
context_section_description: Skyscraper development paused during the years of the Second World War. Once development began again in the 1950s and 1960s, the skyscraper entered a different phase of development, usually called the international or modern period. Some experimental designs in this style had been built in the U.S. using European architectural concepts in the early 1930s, most notably the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society and McGraw-Hill Buildings. Post-war, their modernist themes were used in a new generation of skyscrapers. These stood alone on individual plots in the fashion of the Rockefeller Centre's RCA building, rather than as part of a row of buildings, forming huge slabs and towers featuring huge glass façades, breaking with earlier skyscraper traditions. Inside, new technologies such as fluorescent lighting and widespread air-conditioning meant that many older architectural features such as light courts and operable windows were unnecessary.
  The trend had substantial implications for many early skyscrapers. Some were redesigned to fit new tastes. Much of the ornate detail was removed from the Metropolitan Life Tower in the 1960s, for example, to fit contemporary, plainer fashions. Many older skyscrapers could not be adapted, however, as they lacked the physical depth to build larger modern offices or the space for new service facilities. Some were demolished to make way for new, larger structures. Amongst these was the Singer Tower, demolished in 1968 and replaced by the international style United States Steel Building. In the 21st century, buildings such as 90 West Street have been renovated as upmarket housing, partially because of their extensive windows and access to sunlight.
  Critical discussion of early skyscrapers began from the 1880s onwards in the architectural community and continued across a growing cultural and academic community in the inter-war period. In 1930, the terms the Chicago "school" and "movement" began to be used for the first time, popularised by the 1940s academics Sigfried Giedion and Carl Condit as a label for the early Chicago architects. They regarded skyscrapers as the early forerunners of modernism and as marking a clear break with earlier architectural forms in the U.S. This interpretation of Chicago's skyscrapers was later challenged by Robert Bruegmann and Daniel Bluestone, who argued that it underplayed the links of the movement to pre-existing Chicago culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, analysis of the early skyscrapers increasingly shifted away from the architects and architecture of the individual buildings to considerations of skyscrapers' roles in the wider urban context. Histories stressing the social, economic, and cultural dimension of skyscrapers began to be produced, with New York's skyscrapers receiving greater attention than before. The Skyscraper Museum – the first to address the theme – was founded in New York in 1997 by historian Carol Willis to preserve the history of the skyscraper.
caption: The West Street Building in 1988, overshadowed by the modernist World Trade Center
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