• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 745 0

eclectic as he was modern and utilitarian. He had studied architecture in Paris between 1908 and 1911 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and would attend the annual Society of Beaux-Arts Architects’ Ball in 1930 triumphantly dressed as his lofty, shimmering creation. While other Art Deco buildings incorporated Gothic or Mayan motifs, Van Alen used a modernist, theatrical “machine aesthetic” for the Chrysler Building. His design embodied “the emblazonment of automotive progress,” adorning the building with winged radiator caps and a frieze of stylized mudguards and hubcaps. The reflective chrome vertex was planned to seem to melt into the sky. But most mesmeric of all was the Chrysler Building’s height. From its uppermost point, wrote one visitor nearly sixty years after its completion, “the city below appears as dreamy, distant, and unnecessary as the mercury-colored sea must look to an enraptured diver.”

Like the building itself, the four monumental murals in the lobby were designed to exalt the automotive industry and its commitment to progress and civilization. The first mural uses a single worker to signify strength; the second portrays the natural materials of energy and how man harnesses it; the third, representing craftsmanship, is a group of portraits of fifty laborers who worked on the building itself: masons, riveters and riggers; the fourth is a paean to transportation, picturing ocean liners, dirigibles, trains and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis—but no cars. Surmounting them all is the image of a virtuous knight, symbol of the good faith and sense of responsibility felt by the worthy industrialist towards the people whose lives his products were transforming.

Workers began their excavations into Manhattan’s mica bedrock in November 1928 and the first steel billet was set five months later. In September 1929, as brokers and office workers returned from their Labor Day break, the building was topped and installation commenced of the chromium-clad dome, spire and eagle-headed and -winged finials. Van Alen’s technical ingenuity and engineering were long-lasting; seventy years later, when the building was restored, none of the spire’s cladding needed replacing. The building was also noteworthy for its safe working conditions. At a time when on average one laborer died for every floor that was erected above the fifteenth, not one of the 2,400 men who worked on the thousand-foot-tall Chrysler Building was killed in its construction.

When it was finished, Architectural Forum hailed the Chrysler Building as “simply the realization, the fulfillment in metal and masonry, of a one-man dream, a dream of such ambition and such magnitude as to defy the comprehension and the criticism of ordinary man or by ordinary standards.” It represented not just the triumph of industry, but the triumph of aspiration.

The first office workers began moving into the Chrysler Building in April 1930, the month before its official opening. By the time it had been completed, that July, it had a 65 per cent occupancy rate. Tenants included Henry Luce’s Time Incorporated empire (whose Time magazine had hailed Walter Chrysler as Man of the Year) and the oil company Texaco as well as Chrysler Motors itself.

Considering the economic background, the Chrysler Building was an incredible success. Even in 1935, 70 percent of its office space was full. By contrast the nearby skyscraper that overtook it as the tallest building in the world in 1931, the 102-story Empire State Building, was a flop. Built by John Raskob as a direct challenge to Walter Chrysler’s building, it cost over $26 million to construct (as opposed to $14 million for the Chrysler Building) and its offices were less than a quarter full when it was finished in 1931. It was not until the 1940s that it began to make money. New Yorkers nicknamed it the Empty State Building.

Walter Chrysler commissioned the Chrysler Building at precisely the moment when the great “Bull Market” of the late 1920s was rising to its frenzied peak. It was no accident that the era’s monument to success should