The Skyline Machine: How Midtown Made the Skyscraper in Three Decades

Look at a photograph of the Manhattan skyline from the 1920s. Look at a photograph from the 1950s. The buildings have nothing in common. Stepped pyramidal silhouettes with carved limestone crowns in the first picture. Slim glass slabs with bronze mullions in the second. In between, in roughly thirty years, the tall office building was redesigned from scratch twice.

Midtown is where both redesigns happened. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Daily News Building, Lever House, the Seagram Building, and the unmarked but load-bearing 1913 baseline of Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library all sit inside a forty-block rectangle between 34th and 53rd Streets. The tour that walks them argues the skyline is not a collection of buildings. It is a record of three successive grammars being worked out at full scale.

The first grammar: Beaux-Arts horizontal

The two buildings the tour begins with, the New York Public Library Schwarzman Building at 42nd and Fifth and Grand Central Terminal at 42nd and Park, are not skyscrapers. They are 1911 and 1913 horizontal civic monuments. Carrère and Hastings designed the library. Reed and Stem with Warren and Wetmore designed the terminal. Both are Beaux-Arts in the strict architectural sense: classical orders, axial symmetry, sculptural programs by named sculptors, a hierarchy of decorated stone over a steel frame.

The library and the terminal are the visual baseline the rest of Midtown was built over. When the tall buildings arrived, they were tall against these. Patience and Fortitude, the marble lions on the library steps, kept their place at street level while the towers behind them climbed past two hundred metres. The horizontal civic monument is the thing the vertical commercial monument was built to be different from.

This is the grammar that ended on the morning of 23 October 1929.

The second grammar: the wedding cake

On the morning of 23 October 1929, the architect William Van Alen stood at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and watched the spire of the Chrysler Building come up out of the fire shaft. The spire was 125 feet of stainless steel in four assembled sections. It had been built in secret inside the shaft over several weeks. The hoist, by the most-cited modern account, took roughly ninety minutes. When it was bolted into place, the Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world.

Nineteen days later, on 13 November 1929, 40 Wall Street downtown topped out at 927 feet. It had been designed by Van Alen's former business partner, H. Craig Severance, who had not known the spire existed until it appeared. Severance's building had been built to be the world's tallest. For about four weeks after its formal completion in May 1930, by a strict completed-structures count, it was. Then on 27 May 1930 the Chrysler Building opened with its hidden spire counted, and the title moved seventeen blocks north.

Eleven months later, on 1 May 1931, the Empire State Building opened at 1,250 feet. Shreve, Lamb and Harmon designed it. John Jakob Raskob and former New York governor Al Smith were the lead financiers. Construction took 410 days. The building opened seventy-five percent empty. It was nicknamed the Empty State Building. It did not turn a profit until the early 1950s.

It held the title of world's tallest for forty-one years. Until the World Trade Center north tower topped in late 1970, no taller building was built anywhere.

Three buildings, nineteen months, three claims to the title. Then forty-one years of silence at the top.

The architectural grammar these three towers share is the wedding cake. Stepped pyramidal massing. Setbacks at regular intervals up the shaft. A heavy decorated crown at the top. This silhouette was not a stylistic choice. It was a legal constraint. The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution required tall buildings to step inward inside a diagonal envelope defined by street width, with a slim tower allowed unlimited height on twenty-five percent of the lot. Every tall building in Manhattan from 1916 to 1961 was built inside that envelope. The Art Deco style of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the carved limestone setbacks, the eagle gargoyles on Chrysler's 61st floor corners, the mooring mast crown on the Empire State Building originally intended for zeppelins, was the ornamentation hung on a regulatory shape.

The race for the sky and the wedding cake silhouette ran together for fifteen years. Then the Depression killed the upper-floor office market and the financing dried up. After 1931, almost no major Manhattan skyscraper was built for two decades. The grammar stopped because the buildings stopped.

The third grammar: the glass curtain

Lever House opened at 390 Park Avenue in 1952. Gordon Bunshaft was the designer; the firm was Skidmore Owings and Merrill. The building was twenty-one stories on a horizontal podium. The exterior was a blue-green glass curtain wall, the first major commercial tower on Park Avenue without applied stone ornament. The plaza beneath the slim tower was a public ground-level void where the wedding-cake setbacks would have been.

Six years later, in 1958, the Seagram Building opened at 375 Park Avenue, directly across the street. Mies van der Rohe designed it with Philip Johnson. The tower was bronze and glass. It used 1,500 tons of bronze as decorative cladding, hung on a steel frame. It was set back one hundred feet from Park Avenue behind a granite plaza. Mies's signature move, the non-functional bronze I-beam mullions that ran the full height of the façade and expressed the structural frame even though they did not carry it, was the new grammar made canonical.

Lever House and Seagram are the buildings every glass office tower since has been imitating. The flat slab on a plaza. The glass curtain wall. The structural frame expressed in decorative mullions. The horizontal podium and the slim vertical shaft. The Mies grammar is the grammar of the Manhattan office tower from 1958 onward, and from the 1960s onward it was the grammar of office towers in Chicago, Toronto, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore, and every other city that wanted to be New York.

The wedding cake stopped because the law was rewritten. The 1961 Zoning Resolution introduced floor area ratios, plaza bonuses, and tower-on-a-plinth allowances that made the Mies grammar legal at scale. Lever House and Seagram were built under the 1916 code using variances; the buildings that copied them were built under the 1961 code as standard.

What the tour does with the three grammars

The tour walks the grammars in order. Bryant Park and the library steps. One block east to Grand Central, the Beaux-Arts baseline. One block east to the Chrysler Building, the first claim of the race. Three blocks east to the Daily News Building, the Art Deco vernacular Raymond Hood worked out in 1930. Then north up Park Avenue to Lever House, the first break. Across the street to Seagram, the break confirmed. Then south to the Empire State Building, the building that ended the race.

The route is roughly two and a half kilometres. The argument is that the skyline is a record of three architectural languages worked out, exhausted, and replaced inside three decades. The wedding cake came out of a 1916 law. The glass curtain came out of European modernism and a 1961 law. The Beaux-Arts baseline came out of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a generation of American architects who had trained there.

The Chrysler crown and the Seagram plaza are forty years apart in time and zero years apart in walking distance. The architectural distance is the tour. By the end of it you can stand at 34th and Fifth, look north up the avenue, and see a hundred years of office-tower design in one frame.

The skyline is the machine that made the machine.