America the Ingenious by Kevin Baker

Author:Kevin Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artisan
Published: 2016-09-15T18:23:08+00:00

Building Backward

Steel-Frame Construction

Chicago’s New York Life Building, the first true skyscraper, and today a four-star hotel.

They began to rise out of the prairie by Lake Michigan: buildings taller than anything but the highest cathedrals. Buildings that could be constructed upside down and that were just as thick on top as they were at the base. Buildings the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.

Chicago in the 1880s was the perfect place to build, mostly because the whole place had burned down in 1871 and had never really been rebuilt. Now there was a construction frenzy, spurred by an America that was about to become the world’s leading economy and by the influx of immigrants pouring into the Midwest by rail.

“Chicago has thus far had but three directions, north, south and west,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune, “but there are indications now that a fourth is to be added . . . zenithward.”

“Zenithward” it would be. In 1882, a pair of immortals in what would become known as the “Chicago School” of architecture, Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root Jr., erected the ten-story Montauk, the first building to be called a “skyscraper.” It made revolutionary use of fireproofing materials and solved one of the problems of building tall in Chicago’s soggy, shifting soil when Root invented an ingenious “floating raft”—a foundation of steel rails wrapped in concrete, upon which the building could distribute its weight evenly.

Yet the Montauk had essentially been built as every other building in history had been, with load-bearing masonry walls. The limitations of this for going zenithward became clear in another Burnham and Root creation, the sixteen-story Monadnock Building, which had ground-floor walls that were six feet thick and took up 15 percent of the floor area. Wrought-iron frames were one alternative, but iron was massive, not terribly flexible, and could become brittle and collapse without warning.

The answer was provided by the man who had taught Burnham—as well as Louis Sullivan, and many other key architects in the Chicago School. Major William Le Baron Jenney was an eccentric figure, affectionately described by Sullivan as “monstrously pop-eyed, with hanging mobile features, sensuous lips,” someone whose “English speech jerked about as if it had St. Vitus’s dance.”

Jenney had been born just outside New Bedford, Massachusetts, to a father who owned a fleet of whaling ships (see Power Plant at Sea: The Whaling Ship), and thereafter his life had been one long adventure. He had mined for gold in California, engineered a rail line across lower Mexico, and sailed on one of his father’s whalers to the Philippines, where he saw treehouse constructions that might have helped inspire his skyscraper designs.

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