image for illustration: Peter Badcock
Open Culture features architectural historian Tony Robins in a half-hour video explores the enduring ‘big stars of the New York City skyline’
Open Culture writes:
…Currently, the tallest buildings in New York City are One World Trade Center, Central Park Tower, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were completed in the twenty-twenties, and all of them have attracted comment, sometimes admiring, sometimes bewildered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest building in the world….
… This video [recorded by Colin Marshall] comes as the pilot episode of ‘Obsession to Detail,’ a new series from Daily Mail Business YouTube channel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of architectural commentary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job. He knows that the Woolworth Building’s lobby contains gargoyle-like caricatures of its architect and client; that the Chrysler Building once had a private club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a painting of the New York skyline and a view of the real thing; that the 86-story Empire State Building is promoted as having 102 stories only by including its unused dirigible mooring mast and sub-basements; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as ‘the vertical style,’ in reference to the proportions its buildings were rapidly gaining.
An experienced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he didn’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s presumably also part of his job to frame the processes that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these skyscrapers as in keeping with the ceaseless one-upmanship and self-promotion that is the spirit of his city. A particularly illustrative episode occurred when Minoru Yamasaki’s original World Trade Center went up in the early seventies, which provoked a response from the Empire State Building in the form of a rectangular addition on top that would preserve its status as the world’s tallest building. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the architect who designed that proposal if he was serious. ‘Of course not,’ came the reply. ‘This was all for public relations. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.’
- An Architect Demystifies the Art Deco Design of the Iconic Chrysler Building (1930)
- The Story of the Flatiron Building, ‘New York’s Strangest Tower’
- An Immersive, Architectural Tour of New York City’s Iconic Grand Central Terminal
- Watch the Building of the Empire State Building in Color: The Creation of the Iconic 1930s Skyscraper From Start to Finish
- New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower
- How the World Trade Center Was Rebuilt: A Visual Exploration of a 20-Year Project
- Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
