Art Deco skyscrapers
For about fifteen years the tall office building had a look of its own: stepped back in stages, ribbed with vertical piers, crowned in metal or stone. The Chrysler Building is the one everybody pictures, and a 1916 zoning law is the reason it has that shape.
What makes a skyscraper Art Deco
Art Deco is the design style of the 1920s and 1930s, named after the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. On a skyscraper it shows up in four places. The massing steps back as the tower rises. Piers run from base to roofline without a break, so the windows sit in recessed bands between them and the eye reads the building as vertical. Ornament is cut in stone or cast in metal instead of borrowed from a Greek temple: chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts, stylized flowers, figures of industry over the entrance, in stainless steel, aluminum, colored terra cotta and glass brick. And the top is designed as a top, a crown or spire meant to be seen from across the river. Steel frames and elevators had settled the engineering question in Chicago in the 1880s, whichthe invention of the skyscraper covers; what a tall building should look like was still open, and the generation before had answered with Gothic pinnacles.
The 1916 zoning law and the wedding-cake silhouette
New York passed the first comprehensive zoning resolution in the United States in 1916, after the 164 m Equitable Building threw a seven-acre shadow over lower Manhattan. It tied a tower's bulk to the width of the street it faced: above a certain height the walls had to step back from the lot line, and only once the floor plate shrank to a quarter of the lot could the building go straight up.
Hugh Ferriss drew that legal envelope in the 1920s as a stepped mountain of masonry, and the profession treated his charcoal studies as a brief. The result is the wedding-cake silhouette: a broad base, two or three setbacks, a slender shaft, a crown. Towers from Manhattan to Omaha share a shape nobody designed on purpose.
The Chrysler Building, 1930
The Chrysler Building is 319 m (1,047 ft) and 77 floors, designed by William Van Alen for Walter Chrysler and opened in 1930. The crown is seven stacked arches clad in Nirosta stainless steel, riveted in a sunburst pattern and pierced with triangular windows. A frieze of hubcaps and winged radiator caps runs around the 31st floor, and eight eagle heads modeled on a Chrysler hood ornament project from the corners of the 61st.
The height came out of a race. Van Alen's former partner H. Craig Severance was building 40 Wall Street downtown and kept raising his number, so Van Alen had a 56 m spire assembled in sections inside the dome, out of sight. On 23 October 1929 the 27-ton piece was hoisted through the roof and bolted into place in about ninety minutes, which settled the contest at 1,047 ft against 927 ft. That record lasted eleven months.
The Empire State Building, 1931
The Empire State Building took the record in 1931 at 381 m (1,250 ft) and 102 floors, and kept it until 1970. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon designed it, and it went up in about thirteen months at a pace that depended on scheduling deliveries to the hour, because the Fifth Avenue site had no room to store anything. It is the largest Art Deco building anywhere by floor area and the most restrained of the famous ones: Indiana limestone, vertical strips of nickel and chrome steel between the window bands, a lobby ceiling of aluminum and gold leaf. The mast on top was sold as an airship dock, never worked as one, and now carries the television antenna.
Rockefeller Center and the American Radiator Building
Rockefeller Center, begun in 1931, is the style at the scale of a district: fourteen buildings on a shared axis in matching Indiana limestone, with the 259 m RCA Building (now 30 Rockefeller Plaza) as the slab in the middle. Lee Lawrie's limestone Wisdom over its entrance is part of the wall rather than a statue beside it.
The American Radiator Building of 1924 came first. Raymond Hood faced it in black brick with gold terra cotta at the setbacks, so the window openings disappear into the wall by day. Its outline is still Gothic and its surface already Deco, which marks the point where one turned into the other.
Where else the style stands
Miami Beach holds the largest concentration of Art Deco buildings in the world, though they are low hotels rather than towers. Mumbai has the second largest, with more than 650 documented along Marine Drive and around the Oval Maidan, UNESCO-listed in 2018.
Shanghai built the style into the Bund in the same years, including the 1934 Park Hotel, the tallest building in Asia for twenty years. Napier in New Zealand got its version by accident: an earthquake leveled the town in 1931 and the rebuilt center went up in one style, with Maori motifs worked into the geometry. Chicago has the Carbide and Carbon Building, Detroit the Guardian Building.
By the late 1930s the ornament was thinning out, and the glass boxes of the 1950s dropped it. The buildings stayed, and thelist of famous skyscrapers still leans on them. For the Chicago generation before, seeLouis Sullivan.