Why New York's Skyscrapers Keep Changing Shape

It is said that you can tell a lot about a city by its tall structure in New York that was once the Chrysler Building. Capitalism collides with art and arrogance to reign over the horizon. The tallest building in the city has, of course, changed hands many times since then, but the Chrysler has become a landmark in a place above all others that is now synonymous with

skyscrapers

, now that it will be covered by a new generation of glass office cabinets. Office towers, in effect, Manhattan simply would not be the place it is today without the skyscraper when it first formed millions of years ago, its geographical size was not as notable and if it had remained a small, low-rise island It probably wouldn't have been a big deal, but these remarkable structures rising from the island's solid bedrock have allowed it to continually increase. its area to welcome millions of people and businesses who want a piece of the action its

skyscrapers

that made New York these impressive buildings have risen throughout every chapter of this city's history.

Each is a product of the context and forces at play over time and each

shape

d the next era, we saw it in the extravagance of the 1920s and then in the modern skyscraper modernism of the 1960s. who epitomized the excess of the 1980s and then encountered an existential crisis in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. while everyone was trying to figure out what the future of skyscrapers would be and now we are seeing it again in the 2020s as they reflect some of the biggest challenges of this city, what is happening in New York is reflected in its skyscrapers, they both stand out as monuments to its past and silent influences of its future this city is much more than simply the home of the skyscraper they built the greatness of New York is perhaps seen most spectacularly in its buildings because here on the island of Manhattan it is the most impressive place concentration of stone and steel masonry that the world has ever known.

New York is synonymous with skyscrapers, what everyone thinks of first when you say the word New York, the Chrysler Building is simply the grandest of them all, one of those buildings. that you can't imagine New York City without it was Joseph Campbell who said that you can tell a lot about a city and what drives it through its tallest buildings in medieval times was often the spire of a cathedral in the cities of the 18th century. The Roaring Twenties were a decade defined by excess and wealth that marked the transition of power from London to New York as the world's metropolis.

Everything gave rise to the Chrysler Building, a shining beacon that heralded the city's arrival and great success. of the United States. What is more characteristic of the American dream than incessant competition. I'm from the Midwest by birth, but I always knew I was actually from New York Carol Willis is an architectural historian and founder of the New York Skyscraper Museum. Skyscrapers in New York and everywhere are really commercial architecture. They are buildings built to make money. The Chrysler Building's existence was fueled by fierce rivalry between two and four companies. Architects Craig Severance and William Van Allen Severance were hired to design the Manhattan building now known as 40 Wall Streets, while Van Allen was asked to design the Chrysler Building.

Both were competing to build the tallest skyscraper in the world and both would do almost anything to achieve it. That happened as the planning and construction of each skyscraper took place, designers on both sides stealing or leaking building plans, the Manhattan building began adding more and more floors, pushing the limits of what its foundations could do. could stand in a desperate attempt to overtake Chrysler. and it seemed to work. The building was completed in 1930 and was the tallest in the world for about a month. Van Allen had ingeniously built a secret spire inside the crown of the Chrysler Building.

Once the Manhattan building was completed, the spire was pushed up through the roof. instead, dramatically surpassing the other Tower by 36 metres, but when the Chrysler Building first appeared on the skyline many thought it was an eyesore and yet today it is considered one of the finest examples of Art architecture. Deco of the world. It is undeniably an iconic landmark. the emblems of New York well, the Chrysler building, everyone loves the Chrysler building, it is such an extravagant skyscraper, everything about it is an expression of the moment of the 1920s, the recognizability, the iconicity is something that has value in itself when you say you know I work at The Chrysler Building, people know where you work.

Walter Chrysler wanted his skyscraper to represent opulence and luxury, but that didn't work out well when the Roaring Twenties came to an end with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange and the start of the Great Depression. The city where this global economic crisis began had built at the same time a 1,000-foot monument to capitalism unemployment rates were at their peak nearly a third of New York City's population was out of work the extravagance of the 1920s was over despite all the efforts that had been made to make the Chrysler Building the tallest skyscraper in the world, it only held the title for 11 months until the Empire State Building was completed surprisingly quickly in 1930, then the Great Depression in World War II conspired to create a period of 40 years without any record-breaking skyscrapers in New York the city's focus was elsewhere and that chapter of its history is recorded in a period of absence of skyscrapers when the skyscraper finally returned it had to be seriously we thought that in the decade 1960s New York was a different city there were protests strikes and violence it was a time of radical change and unrest it was a time for something new ornamentalism and details were not suitable for the buildings it became all about simplicity and function in a attempt to revitalize the then-struggling Lower Manhattan Japanese-American architect Mineral Yamasaki was selected to design the World Trade Center in 1962.

He presented the idea of ​​two enormous Twin Towers, a pair of gray monoliths that were almost an extreme iteration of modernism. They had straight, elegant lines, were aggressively vertical, and had none. From the steps back or the details of New York City's Art Deco skyscrapers, these are buildings born of a very different New York 110 stories times two buildings 220 acres of office space that's as many square feet as there are in many second-tier city centers Yamasaki's fear of heights meant that the towers had relatively narrow windows only 45 centimeters wide, covering only 30 of each building, making them look like slabs of solid metal from a distance.

Now at that time it was not economically viable to build a skyscraper of more than 80 floors. not at all because of the space elevator shafts would take up in the floor plate, the higher you build, the more people live or work in the building and the more elevators are needed, especially in structures like this that don't taper and have huge floor plates even at their summits, that means more elevators. Banks consume leasable space. Elevators do not pay rent to move. Yamasaki and his team designed Sky lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors of each tower that would crucially break the Elevated Journey, meaning different elevators could use the same shaft and reducing the total number of shafts needed in the floor plate. .

He allowed the buildings to rise 110 stories above the city, but also created a mini commute for anyone with an office atop a skyscraper. The floor, which was not all Structural Engineering, also had to advance to make these towers possible. The support columns for the towers were both in the central core like a traditional skyscraper and around the outside of the buildings, this essentially made each tower a kind of box inside. a box joined by horizontal beams at each level, this meant there were no support columns within the actual floor plates, allowing for a large open office space.

The World Trade Center is a true anomaly in the history of New York skyscrapers, not only because they were the tallest buildings in the world. They were all so exceptional because they were built by the government. The towers finally opened their doors in 1973 to the public. that had grown tired of them - the project cost the equivalent of 4.5 billion US dollars in today's money and had supposedly come at the expense of some public transportation facilities - some residents of lower Manhattan were still angry about having to be relocated. and critics said the towers looked like filing cabinets, all the boxes in which the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were delivered, but over the next decade.

They were steadily embraced as American icons helped by films like King Kong Superman and Manhattan, as well as Philippe Petites' thrilling tightrope walk between them in 1974. The Twin Towers became synonymous with the city itself. about excessive risk and ostentation it was a time when subtlety was thrown out the window if you were going to do something you had to be bold architecture was moving away from the clean and sober lines of the 60s towards something more extravagant this it was an era of experimentation of conflicting styles and ideas that wouldn't normally work together New York was also a completely different beast in the 1980s, the rise of Wall Street and the fall of unemployment stimulated the real estate market, although at the same time the The city was experiencing record crime and skyrocketing murders.

This was a place of contradictions, of divisive glamor alongside poverty and violence, but of extreme wealth and opportunity that also arose from it all. It was a new skyscraper on Fifth Avenue that would in some way come to embody the spirit of the age. Enter Trump Tower at At 202 meters, it was the city's tallest all-glass structure wrapped in bronze with interiors made of rose-white veined marble mirrors and brass. The building is unmistakably 1980s and contains some of New York's most prestigious residential, commercial and retail spaces, as well as an 18 meter-high waterfall and a rumored golden toilet.

Some might call it Gordy Others might call it pure luxury and that may be precisely the point at which Trump Tower had to be sacrificed, some of the old had to be sacrificed and the clever cashier's store took the hit. Opened in 1929, the iconic 12-story Limestone Granite Emporium was designed by Warren and Wetmore, the same architects as Grand Central. Donald Trump had his eyes on the site for years and when he acquired it in 1979 he planned to demolish the building to make way for his own skyscraper, he hired architects. Conservators wanted to save a pair of twelve-foot Art Deco sculptures and a large nickel-plated grill over the store's entrance, both of which were promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they were ultimately destroyed when it was discovered that the effort to preserve them was causing delays in construction and was not the only controversy surrounding the construction of this particular skyscraper in many ways Trump Tower embodies the fugitive ambitions of this era, the 1980s were the era of the real estate booms of Reaganomics and the ups and downs of the real estate market. values ​​growth and success of capitalism no matter the cost In later years the towers took on new meaning as a place for both supporters and protesters against the former presidents, perhaps more divisive now than when it was first built and What was a landmark of decay is now a symbol of division what a building represents what it means as a symbol can change over the years or even in a single day the world changed on September 11.

New York and its tall buildings were plunged into an identity crisis. How do you build a skyscraper after 9/11? Does the world want to continue having skyscrapers for a while? In the early 2000s, no one really knew the answer to those questions. Some said American cities should stop building skyscrapers altogether. Fearing that they would create a magnet for future terrorism, architect David Childs even said that many of his clients would not want to build such visible symbols, such iconic, tall buildings, that they would never again be a gigantic trauma to New York City and, You know, a setback in every way, no it's not the least emotionally widespread in the entire New York region, so a lot of the reaction was the death of the skyscraper.

Will there ever be another skyscraper? One of the few prominent skyscrapers built during this era was the Hearst Tower, which rises a relatively modest 600 feet. over the city while the rest of the worldwas trying to discover the future of skyscrapers Foster and his partners set out to complete one of the past. The company made a conscious and active decision to move forward with construction despite the post-9/11 climate. Before, they successfully combined modern architecture with the past, both in the British Museum and the Reichstag. Now they were taking that technique to new heights. Building a vertical extension over the existing Hearst Tower was moderately easier than it would have been with most other buildings.

The historic structure was intended to support at least seven additional floors and some accounts speak of as many as 20. It also had six elevator shafts, double or triple the normal number for a place of that size. The façade of this building is more than just an eye. Its striking design, its diagonal grid pattern, in fact, comes from the supporting beams, but despite those striking effects, the Hearst Tower is a kind of forgotten skyscraper in this city, probably best known for being the first to emerge. here after 9/11. -Increase The lull began to fade and engineers and developers began to find themselves in a race for space.

What happened after 9/11. Yes, predictions of the demise of New York and the demise of the skyscraper were greatly exaggerated as the 2000s progressed. In the early 2010s, the world reinvented itself. The Trade Center began to rise in lower Manhattan filling the painful void that had been left on the horizon formed by a potent mix of political emotion and commitment. The tallest new skyscraper rising from the site sought to evoke the silhouette of the former twin towers as if they had merged, reached a symbolic height of 1,776 feet, nodding to the year of American independence, and looked down on a pair of waterfalls. sunk in the footprints of the buildings that once stood there, the sound of crashing water drowning out the city and creating a space for reflection New York was beginning to move forward but would never forget that, in a way, the reconstruction of Ground Zero began the turning of the page and gave a kind of gentle permission to the city to start building tools again, as it turned out the skyscraper was not finished, it had just been reinvented, the dominant office towers disappeared.

Architecture is now an asset, there isn't much room left to build in Manhattan, so as the 2010s progressed, developers began to get even more inventive by building skyscrapers over Rail Yards and pushing. the limits of engineering, the 1920s may have had Jazz and Gatsby, but the 2020s have a new billionaire class, the one percent of the one percent, there has never been so much wealth for so few and those people need a place to put all that money, welcome to Billionaires haggle overseas to develop these small sites that remain on 57th Street with buildings tall enough to offer views of Central Park and enough space to turn a profit.

Developers here spent years acquiring air rights to properties around their lots which allowed them to combine those rights onto their sites and build their towers taller while preventing some nearby buildings from blocking their views and all of this gave rise to this 111 West 57th Street , the thinnest skyscraper in the world. Rising 435 meters above the city but with a width of only 18 meters, the structure offers ultra-luxury apartments. and attempts to reach back into the past, the classic stepped form has returned, as has terracotta, a material not really seen in the Towers since the days of art deco.

This remarkable pencil-thin structure and its neighbors were born from the last Force that

shape

d New York. extreme wealth these buildings are no longer simply properties their assets the luxury apartments they offer are less houses or safe deposit boxes in the sky many are purchased and left empty sometimes deliberately to retain their value mid 2021 properties in the area they were half empty love The super-thin Towers now stand as immovable markers of this final chapter in New York's history. They rise in a time of growing multi-billion dollar backlash and in a world that feels like it is

changing

faster and more unpredictably than ever. future for New York well, that's something that has always captured our imagination, oh my goodness, it's the future, the distant future, as unknowable as it may be, it may still contain flying cars and impossible super scratchers, but the immediate future is a bit easier to predict the skyscrapers of the 2030s are actually being planned today and we have a surprising development: we are about to see the return of the mega office building much like the Chrysler and Empire State Building in New York that are about to witness its next skyscraper boom.

There are at least four new supers. Tools are being built together that add about 11 million square feet of new real estate to this island and it's all because of one small decision made in 2017. The Midtown East rezoning now, please don't tune out just because we said the rezoning is actually very interesting stuff, we promise you'll see that Midtown East has a problem. It is one of the most high-profile business addresses in the world. There are more than 60 million square feet of office space, a quarter of a million jobs, and numerous Fortune 500 companies, but it's also extremely old.

The average age of its buildings dates back to more than 70 years, so Midtown and especially the area around Grand Central, the glorious Chrysler Building had fallen on harder times in the 21st century, was not fully prepared for all the needs of larger digital businesses and the floor plate spaces were smaller, so the historic fabric that already existed in Midtown was starting to need to be renovated. In response, the city council approved a dramatic rezoning or rewrite of the rules, allowing much larger, denser office buildings in exchange for large identity developers having to contribute to a new district improvement fund to create a transit network. and pedestrians.

Part of that is due to improving the subway in and around Grand Central. Now we know what you're thinking and many of the skyscrapers that are coming. The results of this rezoning were designed before 2020 and therefore destined for a very different world. Covid-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. The office as we know it is riding on the possibility of a looming recession as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Hoping to reduce inflation, the last few years haven't exactly paved the way for the return of a large office tower, but that's a bit reminiscent of the birth of the Empire State Building, which found itself adding hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space. real estate in Manhattan during the Great Depression, we may be in a time where there is a dramatic change in work patterns and maybe even building occupancy, but I don't think we're at the end of cities, I think than the cities.

They are our future and they must be our future 270 Park Avenue is one of the first new skyscrapers to enjoy the benefits of a great identity the 423 meter super tool is designed as a series of dominoes a little taller than the Twin Towers in 1973 The building returns to the iconic stepped form of classic New York skyscrapers, a move that makes its dominant presence a little easy to accept, but 175 Park Avenue or the Commodore projects, as it is also known, do not leave to make an impact. This immense skyscraper is rising right across the street from the Chrysler Building and at 1,500 feet we will completely block out the icon of New York, the famous structure from the beginning of our history, now replaced and consumed by that relentless race through the skies that helped start almost a century ago, the Chrysler.

The building may have been the tallest in the world for less than a year; You may not have liked it when it was first built, but the Chrysler Building is New York, it is bold and daring, it is the product of fierce competition, it is an advertisement, a capitalist monument and a spectacular work of art, it is an eyesore and one of the most beautiful structures ever built what happens if you cover it New York is like all cities uh it's resilient because cities are important to civilization and economies but you know that value of a kind of embodied energy and investment in the city by history gives New York an advantage that continues, it could be lost in the same way that Rome lost its advantage in 300 uh, other cities could lose it, but New York still persists because it is a place. of invention and energy, a lot can be said about a city and its people through the buildings that dominate its skyline, whether it's the church warehouse, the mega office building, the half-empty luxury apartment tower or a veritable icon, each one of them stands as a monument of its time.

Buildings tell us something fundamental about who we are and what we prioritize. That's the case all over the world, but nowhere is it clearer than in New York City. We may not like new buildings when they first appear, but the fact is that the city does not belong to one person, one time or even one building, it is constantly

changing

, constantly evolving, exactly as it should be. New York is never finished. This video is made possible by bluebeam. You can get more information about it at the following link. There's also the chance to delve deeper into this and Other topics on our channel on the best world building podcasts available now wherever you get your podcasts and as always, if you enjoyed this video and want more from the ultimate video channel for the construction, make sure you are subscribed to b1m Foreign.