page_title: Early skyscrapers
section_title: Post-war boom
hierarchical_section_title: Early skyscrapers / Inter-war period, boom and depression: 1920–1939 / Post-war boom
caption_attribution_description: Edificio Kavanagh, Buenos Aires
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: A real estate boom occurred in the U.S. after the end of the First World War, with a particular surge in the construction of new skyscrapers between 1925 and 1931. In New York, a quarter of the financial district was rebuilt between 1928 and 1931, with 17,000,000 square feet (1,600,000 m²) of new office space added between 1925 and 1929 alone. In Chicago, limited wartime construction created supply shortages, and rent levels rose in response by around 100 percent between 1919 and 1924. This level of potential profits encouraged an explosion of new building projects in the city. The boom inflated prices in the real estate market, leading to speculative financing and building projects, including the introduction of 100 percent mortgages for new builds. An early edition of the Fortune magazine commented wryly that "all a man needs to own a skyscraper is the money and the land. And he may be able to get along without the money."
  Skyscrapers continued to grow in height throughout the 1920s. In part this was the result of improvements in technology: steel-frame structures had become increasingly efficient, while improvements in elevator design made taller buildings easier to ascend. Commercial factors were at work too, as growing commercial demand pushed up rents, enabling taller projects, while the higher offices attracted more sunlight, permitting the charging of premium rents. The tallest buildings could also acquire publicity for their owners, in turn making it easier to find and keep the best tenants. 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. 70 story skyscrapers became relatively common, although an influential 1930 study demonstrated that the best rate of return on a skyscraper was to build it 63 stories high, returning an annual profit of 10.25 percent.
  Skyscrapers continued to spread both across the U.S. and internationally. New York and Chicago remained the center of skyscraper development, but most major cities in the U.S. had built skyscrapers by 1929, frequently as a result of competition between rival cities for status and investment. Cincinnati built the Cincinnati Towers in 1914, followed by the Carew Tower Complex in 1930. In Detroit, the General Motors Building opened in 1920 and the Fisher Building in 1928. Cleveland acquired the Union Trust Building in 1923 and the Terminal Tower in 1929; the latter, built by the Van Sweringen brothers, was, for a short period, the second tallest building in the world. Seattle had built Smith Tower in 1914, and the Los Angeles local government granted itself an exemption from city planning restrictions in order to build the Los Angeles City Hall in 1928. Also in 1928, the Industrial Trust Tower was built in Providence.
  Skyscrapers were also built in other developed countries, although reaching nowhere near the level of construction seen in the U.S. This was partially the result of a lack of funding but also because of local architectural preferences. European cities including London and Paris had laws to ban tall buildings, but elsewhere skyscrapers began to appear, including Toronto's Imperial Bank of Commerce Building, Antwerp's Boerentoren and Buenos Aires' Kavanagh, Comega and Safico buildings. Many other European skyscrapers were proposed in a frenzy of excited planning, although few materialised. Soviet Russia began the construction of the 1,365-foot (416 m) Palace of the Soviets in the late 1930s, in the Socialist Classicism style, which would have become the tallest building in the world, but war intervened and the skyscraper was never completed. In the post-war years, this style resulted in the monumental Seven Sisters of Moscow building.
  The technology used in constructing skyscrapers continued to develop. Time was increasingly a factor in the projects, and architects and their specialist teams developed faster ways to design and construct the buildings to mi
caption: The Kavanagh Building in Buenos Aires, a landmark of modern architecture built in 1936. It was the tallest building in the world with a reinforced concrete structure.
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