Why Skyscrapers Are Losing Their Tops

the tops of skyscrapers are strange places in one sense they're the most visible part of a tall building sometimes you can see them from miles away but that's just it skyscraper tops are usually viewed from a substantial distance away not up close so small-scale architectural details are usually lost before they ever get to your eye but some skyscrapers do have lots of ornate deal up there anyway a funny example is the faceless statues of Ceres that Adorn the 1930s Board of Trade building in Chicago internally spaces up here usually are reserved for things like mechanical equipment or other engineering related Solutions not directly providing spaces for human occupation if they are made for people they can be quite spectacular places from which to view the rest of the city all this got me curious about the changing attitudes towards the tops of skyscrapers why were they so ornate in the early days what happened that made that attention to detail fall out of favor and what are the Prevailing attitudes about skyscraper tops today this is the jeweler's building in Chicago it was built in 1927 and co-designed by Joachim gavier and Frederick p dinkelberg at one point the building featured an elevator that you could drive your car into and it would take you and your car up as high as 23 floors up this was so that the Jewelers in the building wouldn't have to walk the streets with their gold and diamonds once at the top of the building you might find the four or five thousand gallon water tanks that provide water pressure for the floors below these don't look like any other water tanks that I've ever seen they're more like a little cupola that you might find in Rome or bramante's tempiero just sticking onto a building while you're up here you might also have found a restaurant called Stratosphere club which was reimagined as the spectacular showroom of the architect helmet Yan the jeweler's building was one of the last buildings built in this style the white coated classical Revival that features elements like Colonnades and domes similar to the way that the Wrigley Building looks down the street their popularity was inspired by the warm reception of the similarly styled Colombian Exposition a few decades earlier recently this building the Wrigley building and a number of others were the subject of a photographic survey they used drones to document their exteriors the video was then stitched together to create a single Eerie picture view of their uppermost features one that you wouldn't be able to see from the ground it's really about Clarity it's about presenting the image in the most digestible way in a sense I feel like I'm cleaning up the building facade too like if the stone is yellowing I love to desaturate it and make it pure kind of black and white and it really popped these previously unobservable Vantage points completely shift how we View and understand those buildings that haitha focuses his drone upon not only can we study the aerial ornate designs in detail we can look at them without the perspective Distortion that would normally accompany viewing them from the ground it's a completely disembodied view not one that humans can actually have directly I just respect the the detail that goes into those sculptures when they're hundreds of feet up you know nowadays is we don't even care if like things aren't aligned and we replace a window and we we just don't really care as much as we used to uh but then I I just think about like the person that carved like the little Talons on the Eagle's feet that no one's ever gonna see but they they carved him anyway they were just excited about it I thought has traveled to a bunch of cities here in the United States including a stint here in Chicago last summer he's cataloged all sorts of data and previously unknown aspects of buildings buildings which may have been around for years but just never surveyed quite like this before the State Tower in Syracuse New York has all of these antennas that are added to the facade of the building which is typical you know as the world has modernized there's more things that these buildings have to do but in this case they wrapped the antennas in like it almost looks like a screen or some type of material where they painted on the same brick as the facade so if you're looking at it in the right angle it actually kind of it Blends in when skyscrapers were first made viable technologically and economically Architects and Engineers were searching for principles that could govern their design engineers at the time they saw that each solution was a sort of potential to crack the code and even patent new technologies that could win them the skyscraper Lottery and that would become the new standard method of construction for all the skyscrapers think about like the low lying City in the 1800s and then all of a sudden we have this Building Technology to build a tower that reaches 300 feet in the sky that thing's visible all over the city an iconic Landmark like everyone can see it everyone knows it everyone's looking up at the top as it peeks out from every view in the city Architects 2 would debate about things such as should the building celebrate its height or try and disguise it should visual emphasis be placed on the vertical elements of the design and minimize the horizontally oriented elements and what is the role of ornamentation on this high-tech building especially when much of it is out of view the architect Louis Sullivan had strong thoughts about these questions when he wrote an essay called The Tall office building artistically considered in this essay he made the argument that skyscrapers should demonstrate a tripartite organization this means that they should have three main sections stacked on top of each other these parts correspond to the three main functions inside the lowest part or the base meets the street and has retail the middle part is offices and then the top meets the sky and holds things like mechanical equipment producing the third condition and thus the final design element he made the case that this three-part organization related to Greek and Roman temples and was equally true for the most advanced tall structures Sullivan also believed that architectural ornament should be born from natural forms so much of the motifs that you find on his buildings as well as their tops are various geometric Arrangements of stylized stems and leaves at the top these motifs would be applied to a projecting cornice that wrapped all the street facing facades buildings like the Sullivan Center AKA goth Target helped Advance new ways of achieving these ornamental tops for a cheaper cost they're made of lightweight terracotta rather than carved out of stone the Terracotta is molded and fired to create a tile with repeated designs this is unlike Stone which needed to be hand carved individually buildings of this period often filled out the entire block and flared at the top to create a visual stop sign like a fireplace mantle but of this shape for a building continues to be the norm as buildings get taller the street becomes a dark Canyon so as we gained the ability to build taller setbacks were required to thin the building down toward the top places like New York adopted guidelines that yielded iconic building shapes like those drawn by Hugh Ferris this has the added benefit of producing a smaller cross-sectional area for wind to push against lessening the lateral loads the building was subject to and up until the prosperous 1920s and even into the 1930s these buildings were built to display the wealth power and the taste of their developers I think a lot of these older early 20th century buildings were commissioned by one person one person who wanted their legacy to go on these like businessmen these you know oil or railroad mavens that just have more money than they know what to do with and they want to create a structure to be remembered by so they spare no expense like the building is kind of a part of them materials were expensive but labor was cheap and ornate displays on the tops of buildings became the norm so many of the ones you find in haitha's collection are from this period these early 20th century skyscrapers follow kind of a traditional format of a tower and usually a stepping form double hung Windows a lot of terracotta but within that there's all kinds of variety and all kinds of fun detailing to explore protect our Shores we authorize construction of a two ocean Navy during the 1940s and 50s World War II made building skyscrapers impossible and afterwards architecture changed with it most skyscrapers built during this time don't create an ordinary display at the top there is no visual stop sign rather the building might have the effect that it could essentially go on forever during the 1980s though Architects were realizing what we lost when buildings lost their tops but the inclination and resources to go back to the ornate displays just wasn't there so a few buildings made displays out of self-consciously eliminating the top this is the case of the Smurf at Stone Building located at 150 North Michigan Avenue on Chicago I know it as the Adventures in Babysitting building because that's where I was first introduced to it the design is meant to appear as though the top was chopped off with a sword like it used to be there but it was removed enacting the history of buildings losing their tops over time it's like a story that you can read in the design this is also sometimes literally true as some buildings did lose their tops over time this is the case of the Marquette building where the cornice was removed only to be replaced in the 2000s and similar techniques of metaphorically slicing the top off occurs in other 1980s buildings like helmet Yan's state of Illinois building here in Chicago there was even an ideas competition for Architects to imagine ornate tops for buildings that didn't even have them and this produced some strange concoctions then you have others that do try and revisit the ornate top like Ralph Johnson who even submitted to that tops competition he had buildings like one two three whacker that brought back classical mortise at the top but it didn't have the ornate detailing another example of this might be Philip Johnson's 190 South LaSalle built in 1987 which features a green gabled roof that references Burnham Roots 1892 Masonic temple Johnson was instrumental in resurrecting the building top conversation with the atnt building in New York it features a triangular pediment that doesn't touch the building became known colloquially as Chippendale Tower since the top looked similar to a piece of 18th Century Furniture there's also a building from this time 311 South Wacker Drive that was done by kpf that supposedly looks like the architect's fiancee's engagement ring but more plausibly is probably a reinterpretation of the Tribune Tower this building is right next to one of the tallest in Chicago and you can look right down on it from the Sears Tower and these days the tallest buildings have tops that are more engineering than aesthetic but the tower is a spectacular place from which to view the world in a unique way just like the Drone provides a new tool for viewing the city and when we have new ways of seeing the city new design Trends tend to emerge famously an airplane ride completely transformed lucabusier's planning strategies when he realized that the world wasn't made of straight lines and grids photography as a medium also changed cities it spurred all kinds of new regulations and design standards even the presence of Google Earth prompted the renovation of this building when people were able to see it from a satellite's perspective drones like haithas are also changing how we design and build buildings they're used to Monitor and scan construction sites to regulate quality control they fly above to gather data about the building's use after the building is constructed and maybe they might use thermal cameras to help monitor the envelope performance as is leaking air and so on but maybe it could go beyond that maybe it will renew interest in designing building tops like the way that Mark Foster Gage designed his proposal for a New York tower where the detail goes all the way from the bottom all the way to the top maybe we could have drone tours of cities and those Architects and developers would be inspired to make all surfaces no matter how far they are up in the air worthy of looking at and discovering virtual tourism is going to be huge but when you're in a virtual space you're not confined to the ground plane you could fly you could so so yeah I mean I think as we build out Virtual Worlds we're going to be able to experience the world without the limitations of gravity so next time you're in the city let look up how are the tops of buildings treated are they mere engineering Solutions or are they true architectural Explorations that contribute to the overall culture and the heritage of the city all this talk about Towers reminded me of this brilliant.org adventure that I was exploring on classical mechanics it walked me through with an example of a house of cards which card experiences the most net force atop or the bottom I think it's the bottom oh darn it why not alright since it's not moving the force is all equal out I guess I missed that they were asking about the net force oh well I learned to pay better attention to the question at the same time as I'm learning about static forces all this is what makes brilliant great it keeps me sharp while exploring the world on my own time like a personal learning coach obviously continuous learning is essential for all of our careers and just satisfying our curiosity staying up to date on the latest Innovations and keeping mentally sharp brilliant makes it easy to build a daily learning habit it's visual Hands-On approach is such an effective and engaging way to master the key Concepts behind today's technology and you can do it anywhere on all sorts of devices I'll start one on my computer and then pick it up later in the day on my phone but it was built for busy people with bite-sized lessons that break down important Concepts into understandable parts and they have thousands of lessons from foundational and advanced math to AI data science neural networks and more with new lessons that are added every single month to try everything that billion has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org Stuart Hicks or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20 off of brilliant's annual premium subscription so sign up today if you enjoyed this video please consider giving it a like subscribe to the channel if you haven't done all that stuff already leave a comment down below about your thoughts about skyscraper tops after that maybe check out some of these other videos which come out 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Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 689,520

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture theory, stewart hicks, architecture talk, urban design, chicago, skyscapers, urban planning, city planning, drones, skyscraper tops, art deco

Id: A8oAro0Za4s

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023