Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  We build magnificent piles of architecture whose dizzy heights dazzle us, as we attempt to follow with our eye along the towering walls of solid brick, granite, and iron, where tier after tier is broken only by wondrous panels of plate glass. And as we gradually bring the eye down story after story, until it reaches the ground, we discover within the very shadow of these magnificent abodes the homeless man, the homeless child, the young girl offering her virtue for a few paltry dollars to hire a little room way up in the garret of one of them … Yet it was their labor that erected these evidences of civilization.9

  In another article, Parsons went on to advocate a particular form of direct action: “Each of you hungry tramps who read these lines, avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man, and you will become a power in this or any other land. Learn the use of explosives!” The threat of a violent action against the city—bombs planted in a skyscraper—seized a city still traumatized by the fire of 1871. In January 1885, someone planted an explosive device in the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad offices in the heart of the Loop, housed in a new skyscraper built by Burnham and Root. It was defused before it could go off. On May 4, 1886, however, at a gathering of labor union activists and members in Haymarket Square, a bomb did go off—no one knows who set it—killing seven police officers and wounding many more. In the hysteria that followed, thirty-one anarchists were rounded up and put on trial, and four were sentenced to death and hanged. The entire period of the 1880s began to be remembered as the anarchist era, and it was a story of national interest. “During the anarchist time,” says one of the characters in Henry Blake Fuller’s Cliff-Dwellers (1893), a novel set in a skyscraper, “folks down East were a good deal more scared than we were.”10

  The Haymarket bombing and the trial dampened—momentarily, at least—the more radical side of the labor movement. But the sense of terror they had sown among the planners and builders of Chicago’s Loop had lasted. “Architecture and massive masonry are symbols of law and order, and the iconoclast longs to pull them down,” ran one typical editorial in the architecture trade journal Building Budget. “When society becomes unsettled, and property is rendered insecure, men are not disposed to launch out in beautiful and substantial structures … The anarchist is the plain and practical foe of the architect and builder. Art, indeed, and anarchy cannot exist together. They are as antagonistic as light and darkness, cosmos and chaos, order and confusion.”11 In other words, commercial architecture and radical change were opposed: if the labor movement won, the skyscraper would lose. The working classes were a source of lurking danger to the ideals of business.

  For the business leaders of Chicago and their architects, the solution—more fortuitously arrived at than actively planned—was to separate factory labor from business administration: to divide, as forcibly and thoroughly as possible, blue-collar work from the office. The net result was a white-collar district of special purity: as one observer wrote, “The customs of the city have crystallized the tendency towards centralization to an unusual degree.”12

  Architects designed these buildings for clients who wanted to place the accent on the elevated nature of office work, its aristocratic placement above the dangerous world of the factory. As the architectural historian Daniel Bluestone has argued, they were fashioned in an “aesthetic that created a necessary connection between commerce and culture, denying their incompatibility and suggesting instead that refinement might emanate from tasteful workplaces.”13 Though many architectural critics and other like-minded observers complained that skyscrapers were bereft of aesthetic beauty and ornament—“a welter of objects in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly,”14 wrote the American novelist Henry James, revisiting his country after several decades abroad—architects were in fact at pains to enhance the aesthetic power of their otherwise utilitarian objects. Rather than covering their buildings with tracery and other efflorescences, they deployed ornament in areas that would benefit the clients entering the building and the higher-up managers and executives in their offices (themselves often having to entertain clients). The entrances, for example, were usually decked out in a profusion of competing styles from the past to indicate the high-toned nature of the work within. One contemporary city guidebook entry for the Unity Building (1892), designed by Clinton J. Warren, captured the experience of coming into one of these buildings:

  Entering through the great arch of the portal, rising to the height of a story and a half, the walls of the outer vestibule are composed of Numidian, Alps, Green and Sienna marbles. Over the inner door is an artistic screen of glass and bronze. Passing through the rotunda the eye is dazzled by its surprisingly brilliant beauty, designed in the style of the Italian renaissance. From the floor of the marble mosaic whose graceful design and harmonious color combinations are taken from the best example of the renaissance in the Old World, rises the first story by a marble balcony with marble balusters and balustrades.15

  As anyone who has taken a tour of an older building knows, elevators, too, were often enclosed in beautifully patterned wrought iron and bronze.

  The offices themselves were often less extraordinary. Workers on the bottom rung tended to work in bland rooms that followed the spirit, if not the letter, of broadly Taylorist conceptions of efficiency. And among office workers themselves, there were class divisions as stark as any in early-twentieth-century society, belying the entirely “middle class” nature of their employment. But the importance of maintaining an office workforce that could otherwise imagine itself to be above and beyond factory work had been exacerbated by the “anarchist time”; even where the offices were drab, the architects were often asked to make provisions for ensuring dozens of amenities that would make workers feel that they were part of a grand, middle-class enterprise. This included their being within some proximity of the executive class and being given the possibility of aspiring to their position. Lynn Harding, the entry-level clerical worker protagonist of Faith Baldwin’s novel Skyscraper (1931), describes her own office as “a strictly utilitarian room. There were no splendid draperies, no massive furniture, no murals, no inches-thick carpet in this room … row upon row of green metal files.”16 But when she enters her boss’s, she becomes filled with “subdued excitement. The room was enormous, it was pillared. Heavy velvet carpeting lay upon the floor. The walls were treated with costly and beautiful simplicity. The flat-topped desks, mahogany, were less businesslike in appearance than Lynn’s own.”17 Even if most office workers were stuck outside the pillared and velvet-carpeted rooms, it seemed to be significant that one could approach them, go into them, even one day command them. One of the attractions of training to be a professional secretary, guidebooks used to suggest, would be the comfort and classiness of the surroundings, suggesting that to be a “confidential secretary to a captain of industry” meant that your “office hours are spent amid mahogany or walnut furniture, richly-toned leather upholstery and handsome rugs.”18 Much of the special conditions for office work drew upon the abundance of natural light that the best buildings received. To be sure, light was important for the kind of work being done—typing, filing, adding, and the rest—but there was no reason why gas or electrical lighting couldn’t accomplish the same. Large windows and natural light were also crucial in elevating the work in a cultural sense, suggesting that office workers were indeed performing a kind of special labor for which light, airy conditions were de rigueur.

  When looking for entertainment, Chicago office workers rarely even had to leave their buildings. Roof gardens were available on several buildings, and in the warmer months they hosted theatrical productions, concerts, and vaudeville shows. Barbershops, newsstands, banking services, dry cleaners and tailors, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, libraries, restaurants, recreational rooms—all of these were available in the best of the Chicago office buildings, aspects that assiduous architects and building managers emulated all over the country.19
Some buildings became miniature cities; it was nearly possible for some office workers to avoid city life altogether. Contemporary reviewers of the Solon S. Beman–designed Pullman Building (1883–84) suggested that the building’s “palatial” air—it had a restaurant, library, and sitting room for employees and employee families, as well as model apartments for the office staff—made it “much more extensive and elaborate than required for the purposes of office accommodations.”20 Pullman himself had hoped that a grand building would be “productive of harmony and good feelings, while it will interest [the employees] more in the work for which they are employed.”21

  These sentiments (from 1873) would prove ominous. Pullman had made his fortune manufacturing sleeping cars in the 1860s for the fast-growing railroads. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the president’s body was carried from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, in a Pullman sleeping car. In 1880, troubled by the wave of labor unrest beginning to sweep Chicago and its environs, Pullman decided to set up a manufacturing plant just south of Chicago, with a town surrounding it, hoping that it would have an “ennobling and refining” effect on the workers—much as the skyscraper would on its inhabitants. The town was self-sufficient. Built entirely of brick, it contained many detached homes and ten larger tenement buildings; the Arcade Building, which had thirty retail stores, a thousand-seat theater, a bank, and a library (its six thousand volumes donated by Pullman himself); a hotel and hotel bar; a school; and several parks and fields.

  Workers did not own their homes, however; they rented them, generating profits directly for the company. And the rents continued to go up, while their own wages stagnated. In 1894, Pullman’s workers organized, affiliating with the American Railway Union, led by the future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. The workers demanded lower rents or higher wages. When the company refused to negotiate, they went on strike; the four thousand workers in the town were eventually joined by fifty thousand others. Eventually, the federal government intervened to break the strike, but in the process Pullman’s own hopes for a workers’ utopia had been dashed.22 The only place where he had succeeded, it seemed, alongside many others like him, was in the business district of the Loop. When railroad workers struck, the velvet-carpeted cells of his office building were quiet. For these reasons, it had become normal for guidebooks to Chicago to recommend that visitors to the city skip over visits to the North Side manufacturing and warehouse district and instead obtain a “comprehensive view” from the top of the Masonic Temple building—then the tallest office building in the world.23

  The other company town: the Pullman Car Company’s Chicago headquarters. New York Public Library

  Yet the utopia of the Loop was difficult to replicate in cities elsewhere; and even within the Loop, buildings began to spring up that were less enlightened—and literally less well lit—than places like the Pullman Building. Especially in New York, skyscrapers seemed to be littered about with delirious abandon, few of them obeying the dictates of any aesthetic theory. Looking at the skyline of New York as early as 1893, the great American novelist William Dean Howells commented that, “architecturally,” it resembled “nothing so much as a horse’s jaw-bone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals.” Yet the architects were not at fault, in Howells’s opinion.24 “I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect,” he went on, “as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who most spoils the sky-line, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.”25 Complaints about skyscraper heights were recurring features of urban life; so, too, did the density of occupants in one area begin to provoke anxiety over the ever more congested downtown streets. In one famous Chicago Tribune editorial cartoon from the period, an artist imagined what it would be like if the six thousand workers of the Monadnock Building exited at one time: his image depicted regiment after regiment of black-coated, hatted workers, piled on top of each other, blocking out an entire street. The synthesis of naked commerce and organic architecture, so ardently desired by Louis Sullivan, had no sooner been achieved than it began, under steady skepticism, to unravel.

  Looking at Sullivan’s classic text “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” already reveals the problem. Trying to understand the skyscraper from the inside out, Sullivan had argued that the most basic unit of the skyscraper was the “cell,” at once the building block of the body and, in Sullivan’s particular imaginary, the single hexagon that makes up a beehive. (The beehive has long been a common metaphor for the office tower: it was the shape of the Parker Brothers game Office Boy, and in more recent years it has served as the logo for Freelancers Union, with the bees—that is, freelancers—hovering outside it.)26 The shaft of the tower, Sullivan argues, is based on 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 honeycomb.” Meanwhile, the size of the office itself determines the size of everything else: “We take our cue from the individual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all alike.” Everything else is standardized in turn: “The practical horizontal and vertical division or office unit is naturally based on a room of comfortable area and height, and the size of this standard office room as naturally predetermines the standard structural unit, and, approximately, the size of window openings.”

  Scaling the sublime height of the building into the banal warrens of the office reveals the paradox at the heart of the skyscraper, even in Sullivan’s “artistically considered” version. For the skyscraper is based on the standardization of office units (“cells”)—each of these multiplied out to fill the space offered by the building site, in the process creating a floor plan that constitutes the basic shape of the building itself—which are made to “look all alike because they are all alike.” Multiplied “indefinite[ly]” up and down the height of the building, the floors, too, are simply all alike. The pinnacle of creation, one of the greatest “opportunities” that God has ever offered man, becomes a mechanism for producing cookie-cutter offices, all of them looking, inevitably, alike. The formula that Sullivan coined to explain this individualist-conformist principle has become a commonplace of architectural history: “Form follows function.”27 The envelope of the building was to reflect no particular style, no empty ideal, but rather, with as pure a transparency as possible, the shape and feel of the interior. It was the office that determined the skyscraper—a fact that might have had a beneficial effect on the form of the office itself.

  But the result was the opposite: few conceptions of the office have had a more deleterious effect on the human work environment than this—one, ironically enough, claiming to be artistic. By the early twentieth century, the standard office unit—the cell, in Sullivan’s imaginary—also tended toward standardization. Small offices were usually partitioned off from the corridor with a wall of framed translucent glass; larger offices would be divided into a T shape, with a reception area for a stenographer and files and two private offices behind of about 120 square feet each. So powerful was the impetus to make offices uniform that this plan became adopted for private offices in American skyscrapers almost universally. If Sullivan’s motto can’t account for the wild kitsch that began to overrun American skyscraper design, and the sheer amount of it that got built, then perhaps a variation on it can. The title of an influential work by the architectural historian Carol Willis gives us a better, if less palatable, explanation: Form Follows Finance. For by and large, making an office “functional” had less to do with making it serve the needs of a particular corporation and much more with serving any corporation. The point was not to make an office building per specification of a given company (although this was intermittently the case for some companies) but rather to build for an economy in which an organization could move
in and out of a space without any difficulty. The space had to be eminently rentable. Offices therefore could only partly be about art and work; the winners in this new American model weren’t office workers or architects, not even executives or captains of industry, but real estate speculators. The skylines of American cities, more than human ingenuity and entrepreneurial prowess, came simply to represent dollars per square foot.

  After the garish ornamentation of the skyscrapers of the 1920s, something seemed to intervene in the advance of the skyscraper toward ever more absurdity. The open competition from the Chicago Tribune to design its newest office building resulted in hundreds of bizarre entries from around the world—including one from Europe that outlined the building in the shape of a cigar-store “Red Indian.” Adolf Loos, an Austrian modernist who had become infamous for an essay which argued that ornament on architecture should be considered a criminal offense, just submitted a parody of Sullivan’s ideals: a giant column festooned with windows. The winning building, by Raymond Hood (who later was responsible for Rockefeller Center), was a safe neo-Gothic structure. The runner-up, Eliel Saarinen (father of the more famous Eero, who became a distinguished office architect), proposed a slim, unadorned modernist slab, something as yet unseen in the West. In later years, when glass slabs became de rigueur, this would be seen as the real winner. Yet the Tribune competition—often cited in architectural histories of the period as a peak of public fascination over the skyscraper—seemed actually to be the point of decline for the first phase of skyscraper architecture. Having been built in terrible abundance, skyscrapers were no longer functioning as efficiently as they should, nor housing their workers in adequate conditions. Deep changes from within the office would gradually transform their outward conditions.