This month's museum pick...

The Skyscraper Museum, New York City By Patrick Totty

Although East Asia has snatched bragging rights as home to the tallest skyscrapers in the world, it was in New York and Chicago that the modern high-rise first appeared. So, it’s only fitting that a museum devoted exclusively to the skyscraper would be located in New York, and that some of its exhibits spotlight buildings from America’s two great skyscraper cities. 

The most fascinating aspect of the often intense building rivalry between New York and Chicago was that despite using virtually the same techniques of steel-frame construction, the cities wound up with such distinctively different skylines.  

New York produced two great masses of tall buildings: downtown, around Wall St. and midtown, below Central Park. Both clumps are composed of dozens of buildings of seemingly identical height, with none soaring emphatically above its neighbors. (Of course that wasn’t the case when the World Trade Center towers were standing.)  The skyline’s current greatest punctuation point, the Empire State Building, stands isolated from midtown by several blocks.  

Besides their massing and density, New York skyscrapers also use setbacks to a great extent. This was in response to the construction in Lower Manhattan of the 36-story Equitable Building in 1915. It was a behemoth 1.2-million-square-foot structure that occupied an entire block and rose sheer to its full height without a single setback. 

The structure cast such long shadows that New Yorkers demanded zoning laws that would prevent any subsequent buildings like it. The city’s response was the famous 1916 zoning law that mandated setbacks at certain intervals as a skyscraper rose. The theory – and it worked – was that stepped-back buildings would let in more light and air. In exchange for developers acquiescing to the loss of large floor plates throughout their buildings, they were allowed to build the final setback as high as they wanted.   

New York’s unconcern with height would later lead to the famous construction duels of the late 1920s to erect the world’s tallest building – competitions to led to such marvels as the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. 

Chicago’s skyline took a different path. It is not clumped together as densely as either of New York’s skyscraper concentrations. Instead, it is strung along Michigan Ave. and the Chicago River, and dominated by three great 1,000+-foot skyscrapers that sit in a roughly triangular relationship to one another: The Sears Building (1,454 feet) on the Chicago River; the Aon Center (1,136 feet) just off Michigan Ave. south of the river; and the John Hancock Building (1,127 feet) on North Michigan Ave., just two blocks from Lake Michigan.  

(Donald Trump’s new tower on the north bank of the Chicago River, now under construction next door to the Wrigley Building and where the old Sun Times building used to be, will rise 1,125 feet and give Chicago its fourth 1,000-footer.)  

Overall, Chicago’s skyline, despite having a greater number of 800-foot-plus buildings than New York, lacks New York’s density. Another thing it lacks is New York’s setbacks – most Chicago skyscrapers arrive at their ultimate height just as wide at the top as they are where they emerge from their foundations. Visually, the skyline’s components have a boxier look than New York’s, but the sheer tallness of many of the skyscrapers makes the Chicago skyline look more “spikey” than New York’s. 

In its Big Building’s exhibition, The Skyscraper Museum examines another aspect of the Chicago-New York rivalry: The race to build gigantic, as well as tall, buildings. Over the years the two cities have duked it out with each other. Chicago responded to New York’s brobdingnagian Pan Am building that loomed over Grand Central Station (1963) with the 100-story John Hancock Building in 1968, the first 1,000-foot skyscraper of the post-war period. New York “responded” with the twin World Trade Center towers in 1973 (which were so enormous that some wags claimed they were “the packing crates that the Empire State Building came in”). In 1974, Chicago topped off the 110-story Sears Tower, whose 4.5 million square feet of gross floor space gave it a volume 2.5 times that of the Empire State Building. 

The museum, located in lower Manhattan, opened in 1996. It is a superb chronicler of the history of the skyscraper, particularly (and understandably) in New York City. One of the notable things about the museum is that its narrow building site made its designers compensate by creating a dazzling interior space lined with reflective surfaces and multi-story atria. Visitors enjoy an artfully created sense of spaciousness. 

The museum web site is superbly done.

By Patrick Totty