It’s that last bit that I find most interesting–that the “modern skeleton building” consists of “curtain walls and steel wind bracing.” I’d argue that’s as good a formula as any for the “modern skyscraper,” and if you had to pick a building that exemplified this combination first, you’d look at several possibilities. It is apparent that the designer of this building was reluctant to give up the known strength and security of heavy masonry walls and piers for the untried curtain walls and steel wind bracing of the modern skeleton building.” The walls were not of the curtain type but were, as previously described of the ordinary bearing type. The masonry work could not be started at an upper floor without providing temporary support for the eight inches of masonry in front of the cast iron columns.ĥ. The wind load was carried by the masonry as the steelwork was not designed to take wind bending.Ĥ. Structural members were provided for supporting the masonry, but on account of the size of the piers it is probable the load was divided between the columns and the piers.ģ. We find the steel skeleton was self-supporting.Ģ. The Home Insurance, they said, failed to meet what had become, in the almost fifty years since its construction, the formula for the ‘modern skyscraper:’ġ. The engineers came to a different conclusion. They were the second of two investigative teams–the first, led by historian Thomas Tallmadge, was a ringer, assembled by the Marshall Field Estate to rubber-stamp the Home Insurance, which they were in the process of replacing with the 600-foot tall Field Building. That question is one that goes back to the 1890s, when William Le Baron Jenney and a handful of his former employees conspired to have the Home Insurance sanctioned–by the Bessemer Steamship Company, of all things–as the primeval ‘skyscraper.’ But, as I’ve pointed out in more than one of these debates previously, the answer depends entirely on what you mean by “skyscraper,” or “first,” or, probably, even “the.” Like anything that emerges out of an evolutionary process–fish, say, or sandwiches–we only recognize species like ‘skyscrapers’ in hindsight, and trying to unweave the complicated forces that went into shaping them makes it necessarily impossible to point to a single ancestral structure that set the genetics for all members of the species to follow.īut, if I’m asked to name the “first,” I’d go back to a set of criteria elucidated by a team of experts assembled by the Western Society of Engineers in 1932 to examine the Home Insurance as it was being demolished to determine, once and for all, whether it was in fact the original high-rise. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats’ “First Skyscrapers/Skyscraper Firsts” symposium takes place all day today at the (still shiny new) Chicago Architecture Center, where a dozen or so skyscraper historians will ‘debate’ the question of which building, exactly, qualifies as “the first skyscraper?”
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