Architecture in New York: Bridges, Skyscrapers and the Guggenheim

New York's architecture is its skyscrapers, bridges and museums. See the Brooklyn Bridge of 1883, with Gothic granite towers and steel cables; the Art Deco Chrysler Building and Empire State Building of 1930 and 1931; Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building of 1958, the model for the office tower all over the world; Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral Guggenheim Museum of 1959; and Philip Johnson's postmodern AT&T Building of 1984. Together they show how the tall building went from historicist architecture to glass and back to historical quotation.

Facts

The Brooklyn Bridge: engineering in Gothic dress

The Brooklyn Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn was designed by the German-born engineer John A. Roebling, who died after an accident in 1869, before construction had begun. His son Washington Roebling took over but contracted decompression sickness from working in the pressurised caissons under the river, and directed the construction from a window, while his wife Emily Warren Roebling relayed his instructions. The bridge opened in 1883 and was then the world's longest suspension bridge, with a main span of about 486 metres and cables of steel wire.

The granite towers with pointed-arch openings give the bridge an almost ecclesiastical look, and that is typical of the 19th century: new technology was happily given a historical form. Walk out onto the raised timber footpath in the middle of the bridge, with a view of Manhattan's skyline.

The skyscrapers before the war

The skyscraper was born in Chicago, but it grew tallest in New York. Manhattan had been planned on a grid as early as 1811, and the expensive plots made buildings grow upwards. The Flatiron Building of 1902 fills a wedge-shaped plot where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, and the Woolworth Building of 1913, 241 metres tall, was called the Cathedral of Commerce for its Gothic details. How steel frames and lifts made the skyscraper possible is explained in the guide to the history of the skyscraper.

As buildings grew ever taller, regulations came that required them to step back as they rose, so that light reached the street. The setbacks gave Art Deco skyscrapers their form. The Chrysler Building by William Van Alen, completed in 1930, is crowned by a spire of stainless steel, and it passed the Eiffel Tower as the world's tallest structure. The following year the Empire State Building was completed after little more than a year of construction, 381 metres tall and 443 metres with the mast. It remained the world's tallest building for almost forty years, and you will find it in the height diagram below, beside the Eiffel Tower and the Burj Khalifa. The records through history are compared in the guide to the world's tallest buildings.

The Seagram Building: the glass box that became a model

After the war came the International Style. The Seagram Building on Park Avenue, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with Philip Johnson and completed in 1958, stands set back behind an open plaza. By leaving the plaza open, the distilling company Seagram gave up lettable floor space in order to give the city a room. The façade is a grid of bronze sections and brown glass.

Mies wanted to show the frame, but the fire regulations required the steel to be encased in concrete. He instead placed the bronze sections on the outside, as an image of the construction. The building became so influential that in 1961 New York changed its building regulations to reward open plazas at tall buildings, and it became the model for thousands of office towers. The architect is described in the guide to Mies van der Rohe.

The Guggenheim: the spiral on Fifth Avenue

Along Central Park, which was laid out from 1858, lie the city's great museums. The Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1959, six months after Frank Lloyd Wright had died, breaks with everything around it: a white concrete spiral that widens upwards. Visitors take the lift to the top and walk down a ramp in six turns around a well of light with a glass dome, and the art hangs along the walls of the ramp. Wright is described in the guide to Frank Lloyd Wright, and the museum is compared with others in the guide to famous museum buildings.

In the museums further down Fifth Avenue and in Midtown hang some of the works of the art section. At the Museum of Modern Art are van Gogh's The Starry Night and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and at the Metropolitan Museum Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

The AT&T Building: Postmodernism takes its place

Philip Johnson had himself helped to create the International Style, but with the AT&T Building on Madison Avenue, completed in 1984, he turned against it. The skyscraper is clad in pink granite and crowned by a broken pediment like that of a Chippendale chest of drawers. The tall building was no longer to be an anonymous glass box but to have a base, a middle and a top like a classical column. The building became a symbol of Postmodern architecture.

Do take a walk from the Seagram Building to the AT&T Building; they lie only a few blocks apart, and in a quarter of an hour you will see two entirely different answers to the question of how a tall building should look. All the buildings in the guide are on the map below, and how grid cities such as Manhattan have been planned is described in the guide to urban planning through history.

What to look for

Exercise

Why does the Seagram Building stand set back from Park Avenue?