Skyscraper

“ Immense mounds of coal and slag with glimpses of distant breakers perfected the suggestion of an individual and characterful working world. Anyhow we paused and applauded while Franklin got his sketching board and I sauntered to find more, if any, attractive angles. In the middle distance a tall white skyscraper stood up, a prelude, or a foretouch to a great yellowish black cloud behind it. A rich, smoky, sketchy atmosphere seemed to hang over everything. ”

“ Here were towers of needle slimness, solid blocks of almost windowless masonry looking twice as bulky beside those same towers, archways stringing at dizzy heights above the ground from one skyscraper to the next. And here time and nature had been at work. Some of the towers were broken off, a causeway displayed a gap—Once it had been a breathtaking feat of engineering, far more impressive than the highway, now it was a slowly collapsing ruin. ”

“ It is, I suppose, to be expected that these mighty buildings should have forms which at first are repellent in their strangeness. We, who were nursed in an older artistic tradition, have learned to value, perhaps too highly, restraint and dignity. The outstanding characteristics of the American skyscraper seem to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of the wild spirit of one or two European buildings, of the cloisters of Belem, for instance, though there the sense of exultation expresses itself in a very different way. ”

“ The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story studio building on the main street of the city. ”

“ By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul. ”

“ The skyscraper is inevitably a honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft; and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become apartments—indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small scale. ”

“ What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their photographs—and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street never reaches. ”

“ The term skyscraper in this context is to be understood as meaning a very tall office building. Many European housing blocks, such as are discussed below, would have been considered skyscrapers a generation ago, and the same is true of much urban office building in central areas which often today rivals in height the German examples of the twenties mentioned in Chapter 20. ”

“ As soon as horizontal transportation is put in the house, the skyscraper on its side, and is pointed towards the endless country instead of up against the force of gravity, and the wonderful transportation devices now available are installed, you will see the cities spread out in lines amidst the fields and farms, as if by magic. Indeed it will be the magic of economy, the natural force to which all of humanity always promptly responds.
The height of the skyscraper is limited by38 the stresses and strains on the steel, by the instability of the foundation, by congestion of the elevators. ”

“ Since man’s progress through the ages is a passage from the undeveloped to the highly developed, one wonders what the buildings of a thousand years from now will be like. From that day in the remote past, when the first cliff dweller conceived the idea of enlarging his home by carving out another terrace in the rock above it, to this day when we have a skyscraper 750 feet high, man’s building has approached nearer and nearer to the clouds. ”

“ In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for angels and aviators!
If buildings are to be experienced directly, and [175] not through the vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones; and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly and congestion. ”

“ The chief justification for our achievements in mechanical architecture has been brought forth by those who believe it has provided the basis for a new style. Unfortunately, the enthusiasts who have put the esthetic achievements of mechanical architecture in a niche by themselves, and who have serenely disregarded all its lapses and failures and inefficiencies, have centered their attention mainly upon its weakest feature—the skyscraper. ”

“ But at least until the window washers have removed the chalk paint and the tower has ceased to grow there remains for us the warming proprietary emotion. This building which our anticipations seem to have reared and which, now that it is almost finished, fits so mysteriously into our senses—this building is more alive in our thoughts than all the books we have read and dramas we have seen in the theater. It is something that has bloomed out of the endless crowd that passed. ”

“ There is a definite connexion here also with the rise of the skyscraper, for those very large commercial buildings already required a vast amount of uninspired draughting that could be efficiently undertaken only by a large force of assistants working in what came later to be derisively called ‘plan-factories’. ”

“ The few skyscrapers in the city had stood the shock remarkably well, and profiting by this experience thousands of modern structures—steel, brick, and reënforced concrete—were built to replace the old wooden buildings. ”

“ It is part of the powerful and glittering sweep of walls which we who pass in the street mysteriously erect. High and white, an irreproachable monument, it has grown out of the little greeds and sordid obsessions consuming us from day to day. ”

“ The modern skyscraper has accompanied them on their way, but problems of food and support have to be worked out for them in their new position in the ages. At last they evolve a way to return, to get their skyscraper back to familiar old Madison Square. ”

“ Steel glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut, glittering pyramid on pyramid, white cloudsheads piled above a thunderstorm . ”

“ How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. ”

“ A child with a tack hammer can shake down a forty-story skyscraper if he can discover the natural period of the building's vibration and then tap persistently upon the steel framework at the correct intervals. ”

“ In him I placed implicit confidence, and received such an extraordinary description of that country, the number of stories of some of its highest buildings which were called skyscrapers; the houses of wood which could be moved from one street to another without in any way interfering with the comfort of the people within, cooking, sweeping and washing going on without hindrance; the loneliness of its prairies and deserts; engineering triumphs over high mountains ”

“ And he walks round blocks and blocks looking for the door of the humming tinselwindowed skyscraper, round blocks and blocks and still no door. Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every time he stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reasonable phrases the dream has hold of him. Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do one of two things.... Please mister where’s the door to this building? Round the block? Just round the block ... one of two unalienable alternatives: go away in a dirty soft shirt or stay in a clean Arrow collar. ”

“ Aside from the universal experience of finding a long-heralded scene striking in inverse ratio to the length of time the imagination has fed upon it, my mental picture of a city seemed to call for skyscrapers crowded together over a vast area that could be bound closely together only by a rapid-transit system. ”

“ A mysterious activity continues within the towering white shell. But for us who pass in the street the engaging miracle is practically accomplished. There remains a tower to fit on—a pretty white ornament that will beckon gracefully to the clouds. ”

“ So we took a look at the splendid front, with the two great square towers, something after the style of those of York Minster or Westminster Abbey, with a huge rose window between them; the elegant Gothic architecture of arches, pillars, and points; the grand, arched portal, crowded, every inch of it, with carving and statues; and finally, up again at the light steeple, which, from one of the square towers, rose into the air with such grace and boldness.
We enter direct from the street, pay the custodian at the foot of a flight of stairs of easy ascent, and, ladies and all, begin the climb-up. ”

“ Sometimes the stalactite roofs are lofty, sometimes we have to bend our heads in order to pass from one vaulted chamber to another; here we have a superb column supporting an arch; here a pillar in course of formation, everywhere the strangest, most fantastic architecture, an architecture moreover that is the work of ages; one petrifying drop after another doing its apportioned work, column, arch, and roof being formed by a process so slow that the life-time of a human being hardly counts in the calculation. ”

“ Its noble towers, surmounted by airy pinnacles, and its splendid façade, delight the eye no less than the interior—gem of purest architecture blazing from end to end with rich old stained glass. No light here penetrates through the common medium, and the effect is magical; the superb rose and lancet windows, not dazzling, rather captivating the vision with the hues of the rainbow, being made up, as it seems, with no commoner materials than sapphire, emerald, ruby, topaz, amethyst, all these in the richest imaginable profusion. ”

“ The “tall buildings,” which have so promptly usurped a glory that affects you as rather surprised, as yet, at itself, the multitudinous sky-scrapers standing up to the view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow, have at least the felicity of carrying out the fairness of tone, of taking the sun and the shade in the manner of towers of marble. ”

“ It is of the utmost importance that the sky-scraper be absolutely fire-proof from bottom to top. These great buzzing hives of industry house at one time several thousand human beings and a panic would entail a fearful calamity, and, moreover, their height places the upper stories beyond reach of a water-tower and the pumping engines of the street. ”

“ It is a forest of campaniles, chimneys, sky-lights, domes, and towers, in lace-work and open-work, twisted according to a caprice which excludes neither harmony nor unity, and which ornaments with the Gothic F the salamanders and also the mosaics of slate imitating marble,—a singular poverty in the midst of so much wealth. The beautiful open-worked tower of the large staircase dominates the entire mass of pinnacles and steeples, and bathes in the blue sky its colossal fleur-de-lis, the last point of the highest pinnacle among pinnacles, the highest crown among all crowns.... ”

“ In the disturbed times of the city, every large edifice was a fortress, and every powerful family had its tower. By and by the possession of such a building became a mark of splendour and distinction; and as, at last, a perpendicular tower was a common and every-day thing, an oblique one was built. Both architect and owner have obtained their object: the multitude of slender, upright towers are just looked at, and all hurry to see the leaning one. ”

“ The incoming traveler beholds it afar, and within the city it is almost an inescapable thing, though with the advent of the sky-scraper it is rapidly losing its fine dignity as the chief incident of the skyline. ”

“ It is almost impossible to believe that from the brain of one man could have emanated such a multitude of fanciful styles of architecture. I speak of the delicate arches crowning the massive walls, and which, open to the daylight, trace their delicate proportions against the blue sky; of the row upon row of tiny domes that crown each arch, while these again, repeated in tiers above and below each other, line the three sides of the quadrangle. ”

“ One of the old towers forms another dominant note when viewed from without, but let no one who climbs to its upper platform for a view of the classic panorama of the city and its surroundings think that he, or she, treads the stones where trod lords and ladies of romantic times, for the stairway is a poor modern thing bolstered up by iron rods, as unlovely as a fire-escape ladder on an apartment house, and no more romantic. ”

“ Simplicity, grandeur, ready means of construction, and of increasing or diminishing the accommodation, and of removal if required, forming altogether a specimen of the most recent improvements introduced into the art of building—these are the principal objects which it has been sought to attain. The whole of the construction is of iron, without a single piece of wood, the foundation being executed in brick; the façade to be in metal, porcelain, and glass, the floor of asphalte, the roof to be principally covered with ornamental thick glass, in large dimensions, or ground glass with patterns. ”

“ Most of them, built before the revival of good taste in architecture, seemed top-heavy and dull with their imitation towers, their fretted balconies, their gray and brown coloring, their bands of contrasting shingles tied like sashes around their middles. ”

“ I have never seen architecture that seemed so entirely in harmony with the spirit of the place. By some subtle instinct the old architects seem to have chosen both form and colour, the grouping of the towers with their pointed spires, and the two neutral tints, light grey and brown, on the walls and roof, so as to produce buildings which look as naturally fitted to the spot as the heath or the harebells. ”