Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [125]
The birthplace of the skyscraper, the Chicago school of the late nineteenth century, was utilitarian, distrustful of historical allusion, powerful, simple and direct. Chicagoan architects created buildings to reflect the work that went on inside them. Form did not just follow function, but dramatized it. The skyscraper’s “dominant chord must be tall, every inch of it tall,” wrote Louis Sullivan, a prominent Chicago architect, in 1896. “The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.”
Because America was such a new country, with no established architectural traditions of its own, designers at the start of the century were granted extraordinary freedom to create, unhampered by existing forms or “ignoble history.” Spurred onwards by America’s burgeoning industrial and financial wealth, architects proclaimed their clients’ prestige, power and wealth through height, creative use of color and form and dramatic nighttime illumination.
In 1925, New York claimed 522 buildings of ten storys or more. Thirty new office buildings went up in the city the following year. By 1929, there were seventy-eight buildings above twenty stories and nineteen above forty. “The appeal and inspiration lie, of course, in the element of loftiness, in the suggestion of slenderness and aspiration, the soaring quality as of a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance,” wrote Sullivan.
America was in thrall to these cathedrals erected to their new god, success. Elinor Glyn was content simply to enjoy her stay at the Ritz Tower in 1927, then the highest inhabited building in the world; two years later Harry Crosby was so overwhelmed by staying on the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy that he tried to persuade his wife to jump out of their hotel window with him.
But some commentators thought the buildings were “appropriate to an age of complacency,” their extraordinary steel frames plastered with a jumble of derivative architectural styles intended to exalt the businesses who paid for them rather than extend creative endeavor. “Up to the present all that we can call a modern style consists of misappropriated fragments of antiquity,” observed the architectural critic Louis Mumford derisively in 1921.
Frank Lloyd Wright, largely unappreciated during the 1920s, bewailed the lack of integrity in modern architecture, calling skyscrapers a triumph of “business-building” and damning the rise of “the suburban house-parade . . . chateaux, manor houses, Venetian palaces, feudal castles and Queen Anne cottages.” He called in vain for a new architecture that would “broaden, lengthen, strengthen and deepen the life of the simplest man.”
In an era dominated by business interests, domestic architecture floundered, true architectural innovation replaced by flash and derivation. The sleeping-porch so beloved by George Babbitt was considered the height of suburban design ingenuity. Far more attention was paid to the construction of highways, bridges, motels, airports and petrol stations than to the millions of new residential areas sprawling out across the country.
Perhaps the most beautiful and whimsical of the skyscrapers of the building boom of the late 1920s was the chrome-topped Chrysler Building, designed by William van Alen for Walter Chrysler’s three-year-old Chrysler Corporation, soon to be renamed Chrysler Motors. Chrysler had just been voted Time magazine’s Man of the Year (the first Man of the Year, the previous year, had been Charles Lindbergh), and the car industry in general, and Chrysler Motors specifically, was thriving. The Chrysler Building, intended to be the tallest building in the world, was to be a monument to their success as well as the most breathtaking of advertising hoardings.
Chrysler asked Van Alen to create “a cathedral of modern industrial design.” Van Alen was a proponent of Art Deco, embracing color, pattern and texture, as romantic and