The world's first skyscraper: a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 9
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Version 0 of 1. It won’t surprise anybody to learn that the very first skyscraper went up in the United States, but it will surprise some to learn that it went up in Chicago. While it didn’t take Manhattan long to claim the steel-framed high-rise as its own, the skyscraper boom began in the capital of the American Midwest in 1885 with William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building, which rose to its then-impressive height of 10 storeys (and, after an 1890 addition, 12) by means of metal, rather than just masonry. Legend has it that Jenney, an engineer by training and an École Centrale Paris classmate of Gustave Eiffel (designer of the eponymous tower), first suspected that an iron skeleton could hold up a building when he saw his wife place a heavy book atop a small birdcage, which easily supported its weight. This opened a new chapter in the history of towers, helped by the Great Chicago Fire (in which more than three square miles of the mostly wooden central city burned to the ground in 1871), and by Chicago’s surging 1880s economy. For obvious reasons, when the New York Home Insurance Company wanted a new Chicago headquarters in the city’s cleared-out downtown, they wanted it fireproofed – but they also wanted it tall, accommodating “a maximum number of small offices above the bank floor”. Jenney’s metal-framed design won their open contest, not only thanks to the relative fire-resistance of its materials, but to the additional protection offered by its outer iron columns, covered in stone. Unlike its predecessors – the generations of large buildings supported by nothing but their own masonry walls – the Home Insurance Building wouldn’t have to get thicker, darker, stuffier and heavier to get taller. It weighed only a third as much in iron and steel as it would have in stone. Not everybody immediately accepted the soundness of Jenney’s design. “Where is there such a building?” the committee asked when presented with the plan. “Your building at Chicago will be the first,” Jenney replied. After construction got underway, the Home Insurance Company and the City of Chicago temporarily halted the project in order to investigate further whether the building could really stand up on its own. Soon after, Jenney got the idea to switch from an iron frame to an exotic new material, steel, using a supply offered to him by the Carnegie-Phipps Steel Company of Pittsburgh. This aroused yet more skepticism. A 1962 Life magazine retrospective on the origins of skyscraper recalls how “an aroused critic terrified his fellows at a protest meeting by impersonating the writhings of a steel beam exposed to a sudden change of temperature”. But in the event, not only did the Home Insurance Building stand up, it came to stand for an entire architectural movement, loosely termed the Chicago School, which gave built form to the proud, square-shouldered, technologically forward American ambition that drove the country forward in the late 19th and early 20th century. Jenney got the idea to switch to an exotic new material, steel. This aroused yet more skepticism Though aesthetically unified only by what some historians term the “commercial style”, the architects of the Chicago School shared an interest in creating innovative tall buildings, an effort supported not just by steel but by the electricity needed to keep the lights on and the elevators running. The group included architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, whose firm would give Frank Lloyd Wright his start, and Daniel Burnham, who in 1902 would design New York City’s still-standing and still-striking early skyscraper, the Flatiron Building. By developing and refining the concept of the skyscraper, the Chicago School’s influence not only changed the way we built cities in the 20th century, ushering in previously unthinkable densities, but remains visible in the newest additions to major skylines today. Jenney’s design gave Chicago’s modestly sized central business district – now known as the Loop – a way to expand upward, rather than outward. It was a concept whose limits New York, and later other world capitals, would keep pushing over the following century. The 1940s saw the emergence of a “second Chicago School”, which took the pioneering work in new directions – upward, for the most part. This movement gained momentum during German modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s time at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, innovating with 3D “tube” structures, just as the first Chicago school innovated with steel beams. Bangladeshi engineer Fazlur Khan made the boldest initial steps with tube structures, using them to design the city’s John Hancock and Sears (now Willis) Tower. These tube structures have continued to make possible the kind of skyscrapers that set world records and shape their cities’ identities – buildings like New York’s World Trade Center, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers and even Jeddah’s Kingdom Tower, which upon completion will, at 167 storeys, be the world’s tallest building. Even though the skyscraper itself counts as a quintessentially American invention, the most daring examples now appear mainly outside the US. Jenney believed in designing buildings for the long term, so future generations could “read the feelings and aspirations of those who erected them”. Alas, his masterpiece fell to the wrecking ball in 1931 to make way for another skyscraper, the Field Building (now the LaSalle Bank Building). But its legacy lives on in every major city, places we simply cannot imagine without the far taller, sleeker skyscrapers built over the past 130 years, each and every one of which owes something to the Home Insurance Building. |