page_title: Flatiron Building
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Flatiron Building / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Typical floor of the Flatiron Building
context_page_description: The Flatiron Building, originally the Fuller Building, is a triangular 22-story, 285-foot tall steel-framed landmarked building located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan, New York City. Designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Dinkelberg, it was one of the tallest buildings in the city upon its 1902 completion, at 20 floors high, and one of only two "skyscrapers" north of 14th Street – the other being the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, one block east. The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street – where the building's 87-foot back end is located – with East 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern peak. As with numerous other wedge-shaped buildings, the name "Flatiron" derives from its resemblance to a cast-iron clothes iron.
  The building, which has been called "one of the world's most iconic skyscrapers and a quintessential symbol of New York City", anchors the south end of Madison Square and the north end of the Ladies' Mile Historic District.
context_section_description: The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago's Daniel Burnham as a vertical Renaissance palazzo with Beaux-Arts styling. Unlike New York's early skyscrapers, which took the form of towers arising from a lower, blockier mass, such as the contemporary Singer Building (built 1902–08), the Flatiron Building epitomizes the Chicago school conception. Like a classical Greek column, its facade – limestone at the bottom changing to glazed terra-cotta from the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company in Tottenville, Staten Island as the floors rise – is divided into a base, shaft, and capital.
  Early sketches by Daniel Burnham show a design with an (unexecuted) clockface and a far more elaborate crown than in the actual building. Though Burnham maintained overall control of the design process, he was not directly connected with the details of the structure as built. That task was performed by his designer Frederick P. Dinkelberg, a Pennsylvania-born architect in Burnham's office, who first worked for Burnham in putting together the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for which Burnham was the chief of construction and master designer. Working drawings for the Flatiron Building, however, remain to be located, though renderings were published at the time of construction in American Architect and Architectural Record.
caption: Typical floor of the Flatiron Building in 1903
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