The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Following Hunt’s advice, after six months the restless Sullivan set off for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. To prepare himself in six weeks for the rigorous entrance examination he studied eighteen hours a day (with an hour off for exercise at the gymnasium), he wore out three successive tutors in French, engaged a tutor in mathematics, and read widely in history. The three-week-long examination—written, drawn, and oral—he passed brilliantly. To recover from the strains of the examination he went to Italy. There the high point was the two days he spent in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and so at eighteen he discovered Michelangelo, who would be his lifelong idol. “Here Louis communed in silence with a Super-Man. Here he felt and saw a great Free Spirit. Here he was filled with the awe that stills.… Here was power as he had seen it in the mountains, here was power as he had seen it in the prairies, in the open sky, in the great lakes stretching like a floor toward the horizon, here was the power of the forest primeval.”

  At the Beaux-Arts, as at MIT, the problems posed to students were purely academic, unrelated to the real world. The history of architecture taught there focused on abstractions called “styles.” But Sullivan saw architecture “not merely as a fixation here and there in time and place, but as a continuous outpouring never to end, from the infinite fertility of man’s imagination evoked by his changing needs.” And here was a clue to his principle “so broad as to admit of no exception,” which became his “holy grail” for architecture.

  After about a year in Paris, Sullivan returned to Chicago in 1875 seeking work as an architect. Fascinated by the great bridge recently completed (1867–74) by James B. Eads (1820–1887) across the Mississippi at St. Louis, he spent his spare time reading up on engineering, and discovered engineer heroes. When he entered the firm of Dankmar Adler in 1879, which became Adler and Sullivan in 1881, the urgent architectural problem in the congested city was how to provide light for offices and how to build higher. The new sciences of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall reinforced Sullivan’s revulsion against an architecture of historic styles.

  The quest for an American architecture had found a prophetic voice a half century before Sullivan. The New England sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805–1852) had scandalized patriots by his gigantic statue of a half-naked George Washington in the guise of a Roman warrior, but his plea for an “American Architecture” (1843) was acclaimed by Emerson and others. Greenough dared to mock Thomas Jefferson’s use of a Roman temple as a model for an American State House. Even while the Washington Monument was being constructed he ridiculed the “palpable absurdity” of the original design, “the intermarriage of an Egyptian monument—whether astronomical, as I believe, or phallic, as contended by a Boston critic, matters not very much—with a Greek structure or one of Greek elements.”

  Louis Sullivan was to be the spokesman as well as the exemplar of an American architecture. The professional architects of his day, grateful legatees of Vitruvius and Suger, were sitting ducks for this Walt Whitman of the building arts:

  You are ill. Your eye wanders. This is no Roman temple built by a motley crowd of organ-grinders—spook-creatures of your fertile brain—it’s a bank; just a plain, ordinary, every-day American bank, full of cold hard cash and other cold things. I know all about it, I read about it in the papers. I saw it built, I know the president.… The Roman temple can no more exist in fact on Monroe Street, Chicago, U.S.A., than can Roman civilization exist there. Such a structure must of necessity be a simulacrum, a ghost.… But Roman does not mean American, never did mean American, never can mean American. Roman was Roman; American is, and is to be, American. The architect should know this without our teaching, and I suspect that he does know it very well in his unmercenary moments.

  Sullivan’s brief article, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” in Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1896) became the manifesto of a modern and an American architecture. This was no Vitruvian Ten Orders for modern architects but an eloquent defense of what was already visible in the pioneer American skyscrapers. The word “skyscraper” had already entered the American language in a Chicago Tribune article (January 13, 1889) entitled “Chicago’s Skyscrapers” to describe this new kind of tall building.

  “The architects of this land and generation,” Sullivan began, “are now brought face to face with something new under the sun—namely, that evolution and integration of social conditions, that special grouping of them, that results in a demand for the erection of tall office buildings.” On the ground floor there must be “a main entrance that attracts the eye to its location,” and spaces suitable for stores and banks, a story below ground for the services of power, heating, and lighting, and an attic space on top for the machinery of the circulatory system. Rising above the ground floor should be “an indefinite number of stories of offices piled tier upon tier, one tier just like another tier, one office just like all the other offices—an office being similar to a cell in a honey-comb, merely a compartment, nothing more.… We, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike.” Tall buildings in New York and Chicago had been plastered with imported ornaments—classical architraves, Gothic windows and gargoyles—that bore no relation to the modern structure.

  To his earthy empiricism Sullivan added “the imperative voice of emotion.” “It demands of us, what is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very open organ-tone in its appeal.… It must be tall, every inch of it tall.” Sullivan, no master of understatement, generalized his inspiring prescription for the skyscraper into a universal law.

  Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.

  In his wordy Whitmanesque manifesto for functionalism Sullivan exhorted American architects to “cease struggling and prattling handcuffed and vainglorious in the asylum of a foreign school” and produce a democratic art “that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the people.” But the architect of the future would be tempted by “the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable.”

  Early skyscrapers irked city-neighbors by blocking their sunlight and their view of the heavens. The Equitable Life Building completed in 1915 at 120 Broadway in New York City covered a full block and rose without setbacks to thirty-nine stories. Its 1.2 million feet of rentable space made it the world’s largest office building, but its east-west mass deprived adjacent buildings of light, and cast long, broad shadows. The neighbors’ protests sparked the first zoning ordinance in the United States, in 1916, which limited a skyscraper’s total floor area to twelve times the size of its plot. The Equitable had provided inside floor space more than thirty times the size of the land it covered. The perils of the skyscraper to city life were being revealed.

  The American half century after the first building of true skyscraper design, William LeBaron Jenney’s Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago in 1885, was one of the most productive in the history of architecture. As distinct an architectural type as the Greek temple or the Gothic cathedral, the skyscraper showed the same uncanny capacity for variation, adaptation, camouflage, and embellishment. But while those earlier types stayed on the ground and only occasionally punctuated the skyline, the skyscraper reached relentlessly upward, and created a new heaven-bound delineation for the modern city. American cities came to be identified less by their street plans than by their recently created “skylines.”

  The skyscraper leitmotif was elaborated in three overlapping phases: the classic, the theatrical, and the international. The classic
phase appeared in the first prototypes of skeleton-frame construction in the 1880s and 1890s built in Chicago, or mostly by Chicago architects. While they overshadowed other city buildings by going up over ten stories, in silhouette they still seemed a squarish piling of story on story. The revolutionary skeleton of the Home Insurance Company Building was so well hidden that not until the original was demolished to make way for a higher building in 1931 did three expert investigating committees establish its claim to be the first building of skeleton-frame skyscraper design. Sullivan’s masterpieces in this classic skyscraper style were the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (with Adler, 1891), the Chicago Stock Exchange (with Adler, 1894), the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (with Adler, 1895), and the Carson Pirie Scott store (1901–4) in Chicago.

  When the leading architecture critic of the day, Montgomery Schuyler (1843–1914), assessed “The Sky-Scraper Up to Date” in 1899, he attacked American architects for aiming at all costs at “originality” instead of “shining with new grace through old forms.” He reminded Americans of the enduring wisdom of Aristotle, “the father of criticism, that a work of art must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.” The best skyscrapers, he noted, had followed “the Aristotelian triple division … the more specific analogy of the column.” Just as the ancient Greek column had a base, a smooth supporting body, and a decorated capital, so the skyscraper should visibly distinguish these elements—decorated treatment on the ground floor, an ornamented cornice at the top, and in the body of the building an unbroken repetition of the “tiers of similar cells” like the column itself. Despite his protestations, Sullivan’s own most esteemed early “skyscrapers” like the Wainwright Building seemed to follow this Aristotelian model.

  The liberation of the American skyscraper came not in Chicago but in New York in what the architecture critic Paul Goldberger has called the “theatrical” phase. The different layouts of cities encouraged giving a different aspect to their tall buildings. The streets of recently settled Chicago had marked out symmetrical square blocks, providing sites for squat squarish buildings. But in New York the narrow crooked lanes and varied angular intersections inherited from two centuries of history gave a different challenge to its architects. “As the elephant … to the giraffe, so is the colossal business block of Chicago to the skyscraper of New York,” the novelist William Archer observed. “There is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth of Chicago which is lacking in most of those which form the jagged skyline of Manhattan Island.… They are simply astounding manifestations of human energy and heaven-storming audacity.” These dramatic architectural experiments had special appeal for Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz and their new art of photography. On the curious triangular plot (only six feet wide at its apex) at the intersection of Broadway and Twenty-third Street in 1903 rose Chicago architect Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building, which was the subject of one of Stieglitz’s most dramatic photographs. Its surrounding downdrafts added human sensations to the architectural by flapping up the petticoats of long-skirted women as they passed by. Bizarre towers rose across the city—the Metropolitan Life tower (1909) had a replica of the campanile in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, while the Woolworth Building (1913), the world’s tallest at the time, adapted Gothic motifs (gargoyles and all) to ornament the top of its 792 feet and even to embellish entrances of its twenty-nine speedy elevators.

  Skyscraper theatrics provided a new American kind of advertisement. Across the land in the Old World big buildings had always advertised the power of prince and Church. Now skyscrapers wrote their commercial message in the sky—advertising life insurance, sewing machines, or five-and-tens. F. W. Woolworth paid $13.5 million in cash for his building, an expensive advertisement but well worth it. On April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson turned the opening switch from the White House, and the eminent Methodist clergyman S. Parkes Cadman proclaimed it “The Cathedral of Commerce,” sending a brand-name message around the world. “Just as religion monopolized art and architecture during the Medieval epoch, so commerce has engrossed the United States since 1865.… Here, on the Island of Manhattan … stands a succession of buildings without precedent or peer.… Of these buildings, the Woolworth is Queen, acknowledged as premier by all lovers of the city … by those who aspire toward perfection, and by those who use visible things to obtain it.”

  By 1930 another theatric advertisement had overtaken the Woolworth Building. The seventy-seven-story Chrysler building, rising to 1,048 feet, was the world’s tallest when completed in 1930. It also combined a romantic spire of jazzy stainless-steel arches with ornamental trim and gargoyles fashioned after the device on the hood of the 1929 Chrysler car, and earned its architect William Van Alen the sobriquet of “the Ziegfeld of the profession.” It was wonderful how rapidly the skyscraper sweepstakes were lost or won. The very next year the Empire State Building rose to 102 stores and 1,200 feet. With former Governor Alfred E. Smith as the front man, it proved a better advertisement for American architecture than for the American economy. When it opened in the midst of the Depression, it had so few tenants that it was called the Empty State Building. Still, it became rich in news and folklore. In 1933 it proved a convenient perch for King Kong, who made a spectacular climb to the top. But in 1945, when a small plane rammed into its seventy-sixth floor, killing the pilot and thirteen others, some said it proved that God never intended that there should be such tall buildings.

  Chicago entered the theatric sweepstakes when the Chicago Tribune Company in 1922 announced a competition for the design of its skyscraper office in the heart of the city. Of the 160 architects from all over, the competition was won by Chicago architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood with their Gothic tower crowned by a circle of buttresses. In New York’s Woolworth tradition it succeeded as an advertisement for “the world’s greatest newspaper” but had little influence on the future of architecture. In sharp contrast, the second-prize design by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen for a clean stepped-back central tower with no cornices or belt courses separating the floors and with no imitation of classical or Gothic themes provided the model for future American skyscrapers. “It goes freely in advance,” Louis Sullivan acclaimed, “and with the steel frame as a thesis, displays a high science of design such as the world up to this day had neither known nor surmised.” Saarinen immigrated to the United States to become one of the most influential city planners of the generation.

  The next phase of the American skyscraper, like other triumphs of American culture, would become international. No longer in the tones of a Walt Whitmanesque muscular America, the skyscraper celebrated the technology that was bringing the world together. The provincial, rural-minded Thomas A. Edison in 1926 prophesied doom. “If … New York keeps on permitting the building of skyscrapers, each one having as many people as we used to have in a small city, disaster must overtake us.” And Thomas Hastings (1860–1929), an American Beaux-Arts disciple, foresaw “the city of dreadful height.” But on seeing the city, the bold French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier declared, “The skyscrapers of New York are too small and there are too many of them.” Others, too, like Raymond Hood, saw new opportunities. “Congestion is good,” he insisted, “New York is the first place in the world where a man can work within a ten-minute walk of a quarter of a million people.… Think how this expands the field from which we can choose our friends, our co-workers and contacts, how easy it is to develop a constant interchange of thought.”

  The flamboyant Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), from rural Wisconsin, shared Edison’s fear of the congested overbuilt city. His practice had been mainly in domestic architecture, but he had been entranced by the skyscraper since his early years as apprentice to Sullivan. He let his imagination soar, offered thin-slab designs long before Rockefeller Center, pioneered in glass for tall buildings with his plan for a Luxfer Prism Skyscraper (1895), which was never built, and topped the competition with his grand solution (1956) to congestion on the ground, a Chicago Mile-High Skysc
raper (never built). His tall-building designs, some said, were nothing but small Wright houses blown up to skyscraper scale. His successes would eventually be buildings of a smaller scale hugging the ground.

  The later triumphs of the American skyscraper, appropriately for a nation of nations, would be called the International Style and invited architects from all over the world. Its first great monument, cleansed of classical and Gothic frippery, was Rockefeller Center. Conceived in 1927 as a new home for the Metropolitan Opera Company, its planning was interrupted by the Depression of 1929, but was carried on by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as the first great privately financed mixed-use urban project. The product (1932–40) of Raymond Hood and a team of architects, its seventy-story skyscraper, surrounded by lower buildings with an open plaza in the center, became a delightful focus of pedestrian life. The thin skyscraper slab, a dramatically simple form, did not require the setbacks customary in other tall buildings. The lower surrounding buildings and the open central plaza showed respect for community light and air and provided social amenities. For the first time it offered larger and smaller skyscrapers as a group.

  The International Style was dramatized again in the slender thirty-nine-story slab of the United Nations Secretariat building (1952), which was created by a Rockefeller Center architect, Wallace K. Harrison, around a sketch by Le Corbusier. Its unbroken vertical line, a response to Sullivan’s plea, was the vivid opposite to the theatrical Woolworth or Chrysler Building. Sheer walls of green glass faced east and west and narrower stretches of white marble rose on north and south. This International Style, so chaste in steel and glass that it could hardly be called a style, found its apostle in the colorful Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), a refugee from the German Nazis. In Chicago he made the Illinois Institute of Technology a nursery of modernism. His masterpiece in 1958, the Seagram Building at 375 Park Avenue in New York City, was a thirty-eight-story tower of bronze and glass (with no setbacks and no classic or Gothic adornment at top or bottom) set in its own inviting plaza with two fountains in the foreground and a site for an elegant restaurant in the rear. This plain tower became a prototype for Miesian architecture, a simple structure boasting its simplicity. Some critics objected that Mies was not as honest as he seemed, for his buildings really depended on hidden supports. One admirer called the Seagram Building “a beautiful lady in hidden corsets.” But Miesian simplicity prevailed—in the Lever House (1952) in New York, the Inland Steel Building (1957) in Chicago by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the CBS Building (1965) by the Finnish architect Eliel’s son Eero Saarinen, in I. M. Pei’s John Hancock Tower in Boston (1975), in Kevin Roche’s United Nations Plaza Building (1976), and in the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center (1976) in lower Manhattan, the city’s tallest buildings, which added height, without adding much interest, to the skyline.