Skyscraper

Skyscraper, very tall, slender multi-storey building that, typically, and either singly or in groups, dominates the urban skyline, and towers above other buildings. Skyscrapers differ structurally from other buildings: whereas conventional buildings have load-bearing walls, skyscrapers consist of an iron or steel frame, to which non-load-bearing (and therefore thin, light) walls are attached.

Even before the general adoption of the new technology that made the true skyscraper possible, the architects of Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, were designing buildings that were exceptionally high for their time. Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building (1889-1892), for example, reached 16 storeys, with a conventional load-bearing brick structure. In Chicago, the great fire of 1871 had cleared the ground for a radical rebuilding, and “a city of skyscrapers” (generally of 10 to 12 storeys high) was the result.

The use of iron (and, later, steel) framing in buildings had emerged in England in the late 18th century, but was only slowly adopted outside the area of industrial architecture. A Minneapolis architect, Leroy S. Buffington, patented a system of iron framing for tall buildings in 1888. By the 1890s the iron frame was being widely used in Chicago and other American cities. The first steel-framed building was the Manhattan Building in Chicago, designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1890-1891.

The use of steel and glass, in buildings serviced by lifts, electric light, and even air conditioning, implied lightness and, in effect, a new architecture, but decorative conventions died hard. Louis Sullivan, whose famous paper “The Tall Building Artistically Considered” appeared in 1896, argued that “form ever follows function” and was influential in the development of a specific style of rational design in Chicago. Sullivan celebrated the high-rise building, emphasizing its scale by means of forcefully vertical motifs (as seen in his Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York State, of 1894-1895). In New York, a more decorative approach—represented, for example, by Ernest Flagg’s Singer Tower of 1908—prevailed. The Woolworth Building (1913), by Cass Gilbert, was clad in elaborate Gothic detailing. The trend for decorating tall buildings emerged strongly in Chicago itself in 1922 when a Gothic scheme by Howells & Hood was preferred to more functional entries for the Tribune Tower competition. The characteristic skyline of Manhattan was formed decisively during the building boom of the late 1920s. The Art Deco Chrysler Building, opened in 1930, was over 300 m (1,000 ft) tall and was briefly the tallest building in the world until the Empire State Building, rising over 380 m (1,250 ft), with 102 floors of office space, was completed a year later. The Manhattan style, with its characteristic “set backs”, owed a good deal to the zoning laws introduced by the city in 1916 to prevent the exclusion of daylight from the densely developed streets. The Rockefeller Center (1931-1940) was intended to be a model of environmentally responsible high-rise building.

The influence of America was strongly felt in Europe, where Mies van der Rohe produced a spectacular scheme for an all-glass skyscraper in 1920. Having subsequently migrated to the United States, Mies produced a new model for the skyscraper that is epitomized by his Seagram Building (1954-1958) in New York; it is an elegant, beautifully detailed rectangular slab of curtain-walled offices that was copied throughout the world, often with depressing results. In Chicago, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the dramatic John Hancock Center (1970) and the Sears Tower (1974), which, at over 440 m (1,450 ft), was the tallest building in the world for nearly 20 years. In more recent years, architects such as Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, César Pelli, Norman Foster, and Helmut Jahn have extended the vocabulary of skyscraper architecture. While Johnson’s AT&T building (1979) in New York is the classic Postmodernist skyscraper, Michael Graves’s Portland Building (1983), in Portland, Oregon, shows a more spirited attitude to modernism. The Millennium Tower proposed by Norman Foster for Tokyo Bay would be over 840 m (2,756 ft) high and would contain hotels, shops, and apartments as well as offices in its 170 storeys.

Although they are increasingly criticized on ecological and other grounds, tall buildings are seen as symbols of civic and even national pride and continue to fascinate architects, developers, and politicians. The race for the skies now involves such cities as Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Shanghai, Seoul, and T'aipei—currently the possessor of the world’s tallest building (the 508-m/1,667-ft Taipei 101 building, designed by C. Y. Lee)—as well as the great American cities.