A steel skeleton-frame structure was first used in the Home Insurance Building in Chicago by William Le Baron Jenney in 1884 (ill. 3). With its heavy brick exterior, though, this 10-storey block was otherwise conventional in appearance. The Reliance Building in Chicago (ill. 4) by Burnham and Root (1894) got away from classical forms with its vertical accentuation and an outer skin of glazed terracotta slabs that anticipates the later curtain-wall facade.
Between 1880 and 1895, Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root formulated the design parameters for high-rise structures in “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (1896).
In 1893, Chicago limited the maximum height of buildings to 40 m, therewith ceding its lead in this field to New York.
The breakthrough to the era of true skyscrapers was achieved in 1913 with the Woolworth Building in New York by Cass Gilbert. Its 241-metre height remained unsurpassed until 1930. In appearance, though, the building was still reminiscent of a Gothic cathedral.
With their ever greater height, and built in the tightest of spaces, New York’s skyscrapers also led to public protests. Matters came to a head with the Equitable Building by Ernest Graham in 1915, which not only exploited its site to the maximum, but disregarded the rights of neighbouring structures to light and air. In reaction to this, zoning laws were passed in 1916, requiring the faces of buildings to be set back according to their height.
The competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922 had a decisive impact on the style of skyscrapers. The winning design by Hood and Howells, erected in 1925, was a conventional Gothic-type tower; but Eliel Saarinen’s scheme, which won second prize, greatly influenced the next generation of skyscrapers with its monumental, unornamented form and sense of sculptural unity. The most famous skyscraper tips were created at the beginning of the 1930s: those of the Chrysler Building in 1930 (ill. 6) and the Empire State Building (1931) in New York. With a height of 319 m, the former, by William Van Alen, echoes the fashionable art deco style from Paris and remains unsurpassed in its elegance.
These developments exercised a great fascination on European architects, although the creation of skyscrapers in historical cities of the Old World was scarcely conceivable.
The Russian Constructivists saw high-rise buildings as a symbol of the Revolution, and El Lissitzky created his famous “Wolkenbügel”, or “Cloud Iron”, for Moscow in 1925 (ill. 7).
With the emigration of many architects from Europe in the 1930s, the Modern Movement established itself in the US. Mies van der Rohe launched a new generation of skyscrapers, realizing 14 of the same type in Chicago; while the Seagram Building in New York, which he created with Philip Johnson in 1958 (ill. 9), became the prototype of the perfect modern high-rise office block. This structure also marked a new development, namely the skyscraper pushed back from the road, affording public open space at its base. In 1961, this led to the “second zoning laws”, which allowed a greater development density if public space were created on the site.
In the late 1960s, skyscraper construction entered a fresh phase with the advent of new structural methods. In the 344-metre John Hancock Center in Chicago (ill. 8) by SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) in 1969, the engineer Fazlur Khan introduced a tubular structural principle that enabled the entire building depth to be used to provide rigidity. Far less steel is required for this type of construction than for skeleton-frame systems, making it economical to build to even greater heights.
“Less is bore”, Venturi’s counter-thesis to the that of the Modern Movement, introduced the complexity of postmodern design in the 1970s. An example of this can be seen in the Pennzoil Plaza Building in Houston by Philip Johnson and John Burgee (1976).
In 1981, new legislation in New York stated that the base of a building should not be set back more than three metres from the street line and that new developments should offer greater scope for public access. This led to the creation of the open public plinth zone with winter gardens and shopping areas.
After the Second World War, attitudes began to change in Europe, where high-rise buildings became symbols of economic growth and focal points in the modern urban fabric. One of the most important skyscrapers to be built in the Old World was the Torre Pirelli office block (ill. 11) in Milan (1958) by Gio Ponti with Pier Luigi Nervi. In Europe, however, structures of this kind were initially constructed in reinforced concrete.
12) by Hentrich-Petschnigg & Partner (1960) both the form of construction and the facade system of modern high-rise blocks in the US were adopted; and for a company that deals in steel, a steel-frame structure was the only conceivable solution. In Germany, office working requirements mean a relatively small depth on plan, since a workplace may not be more than seven metres from a window for lighting reasons. In the US, in contrast, distances of more than 20 m are allowed, which results in quite different layouts and forms.
The call for sustainable types of construction has had a decisive influence on the erection of skyscrapers in Germany. The glazed double-skin facade was an attempt to implement an all-glass form of construction with an acceptable energy consumption in moderate climatic zones of central Europe. One of the earliest examples of this type was the RWE building in Essen by Ingenhoven in 1996; but positive effects on the energy balance have not always come up to expectations. The sense of verticality within tower blocks has also become a new theme, though extreme height would seem to play a greater role outside Europe. The highest structure in the world at 508 m, the Taipei 101 erected in 2004 by C. Y. Lee & Partners, has recently been overtaken by a skyscraper by SOM in Dubai that may rise to a height of more than 800 m when completed in 2009.
