The Rise of the New York Skyscraper: 1865-1913. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996 by Ed Robbins

By Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl W. Condit. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. 30 [pounds sterling]

The Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865-1913 chronicles the early history of tall buildings from those of five and six stories built in the 1850s to the completion of the 55-storey, 792 foot 1 inch Woolworth Building in 1913. This comprehensive study of the way in which the design of skyscrapers is driven by a complex intertwining of economics, advances in structural engineering, materials, lighting, heating, ventilating, plumbing and elevator technologies and the shifting attitudes about appropriate form and style. It has fascinating descriptions of the design and construction of tall office buildings, hotels, and residences and their place in the development of the physical fabric of Manhattan. If the development of the skyscraper, as the authors remind us, was the result of especially complex processes, their attention is primarily on the technological, secondarily on the formal and aesthetic and only incidentally on social issues.

If the work is commendably informative, it can also get a bit tedious. For those of us who are not aficionados of the skyscraper, the endless almost formulaic description of all the major skyscrapers built in this period grows tiresome. The descriptions of some of the buildings might better have been placed in an appendix.

There are, none the less, interesting and important nuggets of information, although not emphasised by the authors, which might give readers reason to pause and reflect. One learns, for example, that even as the form and style of tall buildings have changed over the last century, the shape and the vocabulary of critical discourse has remained the same to a great extent. The speculative motivations, the economic forces and the cultural attitudes that shape tall buildings; the role of social institutions like banks and insurance companies in underwriting them; and the need to control these motivations and institutions has not changed much either. If anything has changed, it is the role architects play in the overall design of skyscrapers -- especially their engineering -- which has diminished.

Profusely illustrated and clearly written, the book is an important addition to the spate of books about skyscrapers that have emphasised the importance of architects and architecture in shaping our cities.