| Most accounts of Western architecture in the first half of the twentieth century have concentrated on European functionalism and expressionism. Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe have claimed the limelight, although the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright has also been acknowledged. In this rather restricted context, relatively few office buildings of the period 1900 to 1940 have featured in the literature, no doubt because many conservative businessmen tended to shy away from radical – some said Bolshevik – brands of modern architecture. Wright’s Larkin Building, Mies’s early glass-wrapped towers and Le Corbusier’s heroic Algiers block have been featured often enough, although the two last-named were unexecuted projects. Except for Howe & Lescaze’s PSFS Building in Philadelphia, American skyscrapers of the era were for a long time regarded somewhat condescendingly as technical triumphs but aesthetic jokes – at least until a decade or so ago when Art Deco architecture became acceptably chic. Further down the scale, the masonry-clad, classically-styled office buildings which were the norm in many cities of the world up to the end of the 1930s have seldom had their existence recognized. This paper puts a word in for these often worthy buildings which, in their modified classical garb, showed little inclination to Louis Sullivan’s exhortation to be ‘comely in the nude’. |
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| The Problem of the Tall Building | ||
| As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of business oriented city centres led to a steady rise of property values. Merchants, bankers, insurers, hoteliers and other profit-seekers demanded conveniently located, well-lit spaces in which to carry out their operations. Expensive building sites generated a desire to build tall to obtain the greatest possible amount of income earning floor space and thus yield a satisfactory return on investment. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century this drive for height was nowhere more insistent than in America, and in America nowhere stronger than in Chicago, a city faced with the urgent need to rebuild its central business district after a great part of it had been destroyed by fire in 1871. Confident, pragmatic Chicago architects and engineers brought together and perfected the ways and means for making the high-rise office building feasible: the structural frame of iron or steel, the electric elevator and techniques for fireproofing structural metalwork by encasing it in terracotta. The technical problems could he resolved and they were. The difficulty was to decide what high-rise buildings should look like. In the past, the facades of city buildings had usually been considerably wider than they were high, and each storey had been treated as a horizontal strip of wall penetrated by window or door openings, often with a string course marking the floor or sill level. With only three or four storeys to worry about, the designer could always use one of the classical orders on each storey and superimpose them in the way the Romans had done in the Colosseum – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite. But how how did one design the facade of a building with six, ten or even twenty storeys? Dividing it by entablatures or string courses into horizontal, storey-height strips tended to make it look like a pile of books or a multi-decker sandwich; combining three or four storeys at a time into ‘elements’ from which a ‘composition’ could be made was arbitrary and looked it (Fig 1).Chicagoan rationality provided some useful pointers. First, logic demanded that full advantage should be taken of the fact that the structural frame had superseded the load-bearing wall. The facade could now be a skeletal grid of fire-proofed columns and beams, and the big, rectangular voids between the framing members could simply be filled in with large windows and non-load-bearing spandrels. The possibility that ‘architecture’ could be achieved simply by expressing what had to be there anyway suggested a new basis for the design of facades. Secondly, Louis Sullivan, doyen of Chicago architects during the early skyscraper era, wrote perceptively in 1896 of ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Reconsidered.’ Essentially, his prescription was for a tripartite facade, approximating the base, shaft and capital of a classical column. The ground and first floors, he said, should be given an impressive, large-scale treatment befitting their important occupancies and the close relationship of these spaces to the life of the street outside. Then there should be an indefinite number of storeys of standardized, repetitive offices treated like a honeycomb. Sullivan advised the designer of these storeys to ‘make them look all alike, because they are all alike.’ At the top of the building there should be an ‘attic’ full of tanks, pipes and lift machinery, the aesthetic purpose of which was to show ‘that the series of office tiers has come definitely to an end.’3 With the benefit of hindsight all this may sound obvious enough, but Sullivan’s analysis was both timely and helpful. His buildings did not always illustrate the principles he espoused in his writings, but it cannot be denied that the upper floors of the Carson, Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago were a fine demonstration of the expressed structural frame (Fig 2), and that the Prudential Building in Buffalo, NY, exemplified the tripartite facade (Fig 3).4 |
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| Fig 1 The Fair Store (1890-91), Chicago, Illinois, by William Le Baron Jenney. The triple windows and their accompanying spandrels confidently express the framed structure, but the rusticated storey halfway up the facade indicates that the designer was unwilling to allow the ‘reality’ of the building to speak for itself. |
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| Fig 2 The Carson , Pirie & Scott Store (1899-1904). Chicago, by Louis Sullivan. | ||
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| Fig 3 Prudential (Guaranty) Building (1894), Buffalo, New York, by Louis Sullivan. The three zones of Sullivan’s design are visible in the large open windows of the ground zone, the thin vertical elements of the office zone and the arches and curves of the terminating zone at the top of the building. |
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| The Classical Alternative to the Chicago Solution | ||
| The solution of an exposed structural frame infilled by a curtain wall might have been the obvious answer, but not all tycoons wanted to pay large sums of money for office buildings which expressed nothing more than functionality. In the late nineteenth century, Americans knew that they could handle the practicalities of modem life supremely well, but they were becoming embarrassed by what they perceived as their lack of cultural respectability. Europe might have been old and tired – but it had enviable traditions. American millionaires might have had sufficient hard cash at their disposal to buy and sell European royal families several times over – but they had no portraits of their ancestors by Rubens, Velasquez or van Dyke hanging on the walls of their pretentious houses. Accordingly, Americans decided to buy respectability by clothing manifestations of their naked wealth in the ancient classical orders adorned with the swags, garlands and putty of European antiquity, skilfully applied by American architects fresh from L’Ecole des Beaux- Arts in Paris. The World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 was a dichotomous display of good old American know-how coupled with a massive cultural cringe. The centrepiece of the Exposition was a great ‘White City’ built of wood and plaster, showing the Old World what a complete environment in the European Renaissance style could be like when built all at the one time by a well-organised team of Yankee entrepreneurs, planners, architects, landscapers, artists and contractors. For a decade or more before the Chicago Exposition, American architects had been looking for suitable models for their corporate clients’ temples of commerce. In 1875 George B Post had designed the 70- metre-high Westem Union Building in New York as a ‘stretched’ adaptation of the Early French Renaissance style. Other architects had chosen the dignified, sober and richly modulated facade of the Italian Renaissance palazzo as the ideal urban building-type.After all, what could be a better model for American commercial architecture than the home of a cultured Florentine or Roman merchant banker? This was, of course, a choice based on aesthetic and cultural considerations and it had nothing to do with steel-framed construction, ‘Chicago windows’ or other nineteenth century technical innovations. From this choice there evolved what will now be called the Commercial Palazzo style. Essentially, the style was created for ‘elevator buildings’ (i.e., structures of more than four or five storeys which therefore needed a ‘lift’ for vertical circulation of people and goods) by taking the three- to four storeyed Italian palazzo facade and ‘stretching’ it vertically. |
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| Italian Renaissance Pallazi precedent | ||
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| Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza | Palazzo Strozzi, Florence | Palazzo Medici, Florence |
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| Farnese Palace, Rome | Palazzo Massimo, Rome | Chancellery Palace, Rome |
| Regency precedent | ||
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| Fig 4 Sun Fire Assurance Office (1841-2), London, by CR Cockerell (British Museum, London). | Fig 5 Royal Exchange Buildings (1842-44), London, by Edward I’Anson. | Royal Exchange Buildings interior |
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| Fig 9 Travellers’ Club (1829-32), London, Sir Charles Barry. | Reform Club (1837-41), London, Sir Charles Barry. The Reform Club in London viewed from Pall Mall, with the Travellers Club immediately to its left | Fig I0 Union Club (1883- 87, demolished), Bligh Street, Sydney, by William Wardell |
| Nineteenth Century New York precedent | ||
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| Fig 7 Metropolitan Club (1891-94), New York, by McKim, Mead & White. | Fig 6 Henry Villard Houses (1882), New York, by McKim, Mead & White. | Fig 8 University Club (1896- 1900), New York, by McKim, Mend & White |
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| Banco di Napoli, New York | FIRST PRECINCT, NYPD | Cartier’s , New York |
| Edwardian Baroque Architecture British Beaux Arts precedent | ||
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| The War Office in Whitehall, London (built 1906). | General Post Office, Auckland, New Zealand | Sinclair Centre, Vancouver, Canada |
| Sources of the Commercial Palazzo Style | ||
| The palazzo, in one classical guise or another, has been an influential phenomenon ever since the Medici, the Strozzi, the Rucellai and other rich, powerful families built their formidable townhouses in the sheets of Florence. When nineteenth-century capitalists needed impressive premises in which to conduct their business, the palazzo was always likely to provide a basis for the design. For instance, CR Cockerell used a palazzo-like facade for the Sun Fire Assurance Office (1841- 42) in London, as did Edward L’Anson in his Royal Exchange buildings ( 1842-44, also in London (Fig 4) Edward Walters gave the Manchester and Salford Bank (1860) in Manchester a strongly modeled facade using sixteenth-century motifs and cutting away substantial parts of the rusticated ground-floor facade to provide large windows for the banking chamber (Fig 5).Among the first American firms to commit itself to the palazzo schema was McKim, Mead & White. What was to be one of the most significant architectural practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began when Stanford White joined Charles Follen McKim and William Rutherford Mead in 1870. The office expanded rapidly during the prosperous early 1880s. Many of the substantial timber houses on America’s eastern seaboard designed by the firm at this time are now recognized as masterpieces of the Shingle Style. But a parallel strand of the young partnership’s work was concerned with a refined brand of classicism and this strand became dominant by the 1890s. The turning point was reached as early as 1882 when the firm was commissioned by Henry Villard, a railroad and shipping magnate, to design a group of townhouses in Madison Avenue, New York (Fig 6). Having determined the planning arrangement and decided that the building should have a Renaissance flavour of some. kind, both McKim and White were away from their New York office while the design was being worked up by White’s principal assistant, Joseph Morrill Wells. A master of crisp, incisive detailing, Wells had, before joining McKim, Mead & White, made large, detailed renderings of the Palazzo Cancelleria and the Palazzo Farnese, both in Rome, and he habitually hung these drawings beside his drafting table. The six Villard houses were cleverly packed into a single U-shaped building around three sides of an entrance court, and Wells’s chaste facades were adapted from those of the Cancelleria, minus its pilasters. This was no slapdash, late-Victorian game using approximations of Mannerist or Baroque elements: the Villard houses made a strong and scholarly architectural statement with High Renaissance gravity and impeccable judgment. With Wells as catalyst, the firm had taken the first step along the path it would follow into the twentieth century. |
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| University Club, New York | ||
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| Fig 11 NSW Club (1884- 87), Bligh Street, Sydney, by William Wardell | ||
| Following the Villard houses, McKim, Mead & White designed two other definitive versions of the Italian palazzo, both on Fifth Avenue in New York: the chaste Metropolitan Club (1891-94) (Fig 7) and the University Club (1896-1900), the latter more Florentine than Roman (Fig8). Here they were following well-established precedents. The palazzo facade had been adopted more than half a century earlier in Britain for those city clubs which were the impregnable domain of upper-class males. In London, Decimus Burton’s Athenaeum (1829-30) was a Palladian palazzo; Sir Charles Barry recalled the palazzi of the High Renaissance with his Traveller’s Club (1829-32) and with his enormously influential Reform Club (1837-41) (Fig 9). In Sydney, William Wardell designed two clubs facing each other across Bligh Street. The facade of the Union Club (1883-87, now demolished) was a higher and wider version of Burton’s Athenaeum, soberly executed in Sydney sandstone (Fig 10). The New South Wales Club (1884-87), although modest in size, loosely followed the model of Barry’s Reform Club (Fig11). Both buildings predated the New York clubs mentioned above. |
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| Characteristics of the Commercial Palazzo | ||
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| The Commercial Pallazo- basic elevation. | The Commercial Palazzo, displaying some common additional features: cantilevered balcony, string courses, round-headed windows. | |
| 1. There should be a strong ‘base’ expressing a high storey at street level and perhaps a mezzanine above. The elements of the base should be relatively large in scale. The materials, colours and textures used in the base may with advantage be different from those used in the storeys above.2. Following Sullivan’s model, there should be a ‘shaft’ consisting of an indeterminate number of standardized office floors expressed by unemphasised, repetitive fenestration and with a minimum of elaborate detail.3. There should be a capital to the building, formed by a non- standard treatment of the uppermost storey or storeys, and a boldly projecting cornice, sometimes with attic storeys above. (For the remainder of this paper, the terms ‘base’, ‘shaft’, and ‘capital’ will be used to identify the three main components of the facade of a commercial palazzo). 4. Ideally, the building should appear to be constructed of load-bearing masonry; at the very least its facade should mask the dimensions and proportions of the shuctural frame. 5. The design of elements and details should be copied or adapted from classical models (generally from the Renaissance and Mannerist periods), using such devices as arches, the orders, rusticated wall surfaces, aedicules, swags and cartouches. |
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| The club buildings mentioned helped to establish and popularize the Italian Renaissance palazzo facade for urban buildings which symbolised respectable, cultured wealth. They provided a scholarly basis for the development of an appropriate, classical style for medium- to high-rise office buildings, hotels and apartment buildings. As the Commercial Palazzo style evolved, facades responded - albeit sometimes loosely – to the following guidelines (Fig 12):Most architects who designed in the Commercial Palazzo style felt a need to ‘do something’ with the elevational treatment of the shaft of the building to avoid a monotonous pattern of windows punched in the wall (Fig 13). To this end, the repetitive fenestration of the shaft was some times punctuated by balustraded balconies supported on consoles, or by some arbitrary string courses, or by minor changes of window detailing from one storey to another. Alternatively, the wall of the shaft was given ‘movement’ by means of attached piers or giant pilasters. As the height of skyscrapers grew in the late 1890s and early 1900s it is noticeable that, in buildings of twenty storeys or more, architects found it easier to go along with Sullivan and accept the fact that the shaft was made of many identical storeys and should be expressed accordingly. With these genuinely tall buildings, consideration also had to be given to increasing the number of storeys in the base and the capital so that these elements would be in proportion with the facade as a whole. Consequently it is not unusual to find one or two transitional storeys above the base before the expression of the repetitive floors begins. At the top of the building, Sullivan’s recommendation that there should be a complete top storey containing services was hardly ever followed; the lift motor room, plant rooms and water tanks were usually contained in ill-considered excrescences placed on the roof some distance back from from the plane of the facade. For purely aesthetic reasons, the two or three storeys immediately under the cornice were often drawn together into a ‘terminating element’ by a giant order of columns or pilasters. It was also not unusual to find several storeys of elaborately treated facade above the main cornice, rather diminishing the significance of this element.When the commercial palazzo was located on a corner site (as many were), more features were likely to appear. The corner of the building might be cut off on the splay or given a curved treatment. Above the cornice, the corner might be celebrated by a tower or by a cupola on a drum. |
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| American Developments: 1880 to 1920 | ||
| The commercial palazzo took shape in America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Some works by McKim, Mead & White will be used to illustrate this evolution, and they serve to show that the style did not develop especially smoothly or sequentially. Also it must be realised that they are examples which have been hand-picked for inclusion in this paper to illustrate a theme. The picture would have been even less consistent if one were to look at the entire output of eclectic designs produced by McKim, Mead & White at this time – and much less if the work of other well-patronised architects of the day were also taken into account.Three of McKim, Mead & White’s commercial buildings of the 1880s show that during that decade options for facade design were being explored somewhat tentatively but with a certain gauche originality. The American Safe Deposit and Columbia Bank Building (1882-84) in New York was designed at about the same time as the firm’s greatly admired Villard Houses. While adhering to the basic commercial palazzo format, it introduced some features which were seldom repeated. Two bays of the facade project about a metre beyond the main wall plane, topped by airy loggias under the cornice. Windows are in banks of three in a quasi-Chicagoan arrangement.6The Goulet Building (1886-87), also in New York, was hardly taller than a fifteenth-century palazzo (Fig 14). The treatment of its three storeyed shaft was radical for its time, especially in the use of projecting, architrave-like mouldings which grouped windows into vertical strips on the curved comer of the building.7 The New York Life Building (1887-90) in Omaha. Nebraska is a reminder By 1890 there were indications that the firm was coming to terms with The Browne and Meredith Apartment Building, (1890-91), a seven-storey block in |
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| Fig 14 The Goelet Building (1886-87), New York, by McKim, Mead & White. | ||
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| Fig 15 Hotel Imperial (1889-91), Broadway and 32nd Street, New York, by McKim Mead & White. Demolished. | ||
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| Fig 16 Browne & Meredith Apartment Building (1890-91), New York, by McKim, Mead & White. | ||
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| Fig 17 Sherry’s Hotel (1896-98), 300 Park Ave., New York, by McKim. Mead & White. | ||
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| Fig 18 The Gorham Company Building (1903-06); | ||
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| Fig 19 Knickerbocker Trust Building (1901); New York, by McKim, Mead & White. The Knickerbocker Trust, established in 1884 by Fred Eldridge was at one time one of the largest banks in America, until its collapse after the bankers panic of 1907. | ||
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| Fig 20 The Flatiron Building (1903), by D H Burnham & Co. | Fig 21 The Municipal Building (1907-16), by McKim, Mead & White. | |
| McKim, Mead & White’s 1901 design for the fourteen-storey Knickerbocker Trust Building in New York provided an ideal model for the twentieth-century commercial palazzo. The architects’ perspective shows a nine-storey shaft lightly subdivided into three equal layers and with its walling and windows treated with great simplicity and restraint. As it happened, funds for the upper storeys of the building were withdrawn at the last moment and only the base was built. A Corinthian temple of commerce, the four-storeyed structure was universally acclaimed as one of Stanford White’s little gems (Fig 19).13 The Knickerbocker Trust design is a reminder that by the turn of the century the Commercial Palazzo idiom was being used for some of the new generation of genuinely tall buildings, especially in New York. An early example is the American Surety Building (1895) in New York, by Bruce Price, which rose to twenty-one storeys. The base and shaft were handled with admirable clarity, but Price’s design did not show the same assurance at the top of the building, which has an indecisive capital with a proliferation of string courses.14The building which caught the imagination of New Yorkers was Daniel H Bumham & Company’s Fuller Building of 1903 (Fig 20). Built on a prominent, triangular-shaped site and rising to a clear height of 87 metres, the two principal facades of the building came together at an acute angle at the intersection of Broadway and 23rd Street, giving the building a sharp ‘prow’ and dramatically decreasing its visual bulk when seen from some viewpoints. Unfortunately for the Fuller Construction Company which built, occupied and named the building, it soon acquired the sobriquet of the Flatiron Building, by which name it became world famous. The Flatiron’s unusual shape, great height and grand simplicity have tended to obscure the fact that it was a very large Commercial Palazzo. It had a big cornice, a powerful, four-storeyed capital, a simple, regular treatment of the twelve-storeyed shaft, and a base which related well to the adjoining streetscape although it was perhaps not sufficiently strong for the building itself.15 In the decade and a half following the Flatiron, The Commercial Palazzo style was used for some of the tallest and largest New York skyscrapers. When first built, these buildings were so big that they dominated their surroundings and read as virtually free-standing towers or slabs.Three important examples must suffice, only one of which is illustrated. McKim, Mead & White’s Municipal Building (1907-16) was designed after Stanford White’s death and at a time when failing health (and a general antipathy to skyscrapers) precluded McKim’s participation (Fig 21). Up to cornice level, the Municipal Building is very tall, monumental commercial palazzo rising from a shallow, U-shaped plan. To celebrate its civic (rather than commercial) role, the central part of the building rises well above the cornice in a ‘wedding cake’ assembly of Renaissance fripperies which tended to divert attention from the idiom used for the twenty-three storeys from street level to cornice.16 The swan song for what might be called the ‘Super Palazzo’ was Ernest Graham’s Equitable Building of 1915. Rising sheer from street to attic, it was, when completed, the world’s largest building in terms of the volume of space enclosed, and it sparked off moves which led to New York’s zoning laws of the 1920s with their requirement that buildings should step back from the street frontage as their height increased.17 Contemporaneous with the Equitable, and not dissimilar in general arrangement, was McKim, Mead & White’s Hotel Pennsylvania (1915-20), which, seen obliquely, gave the impression of being a row of four identical commercial palazzi.18 Each of the three examples just cited shows that a tall commercial The style was pushed into the background during the 1920s and 1930s |
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