The Incredible Building of 1930
Of the buildings that make up the Manhattan Skyline, the NY hotels, the businesses…one building stands out as perhaps, not the tallest in the line, but the most elaborate and one of the most beautiful structures in the city. In 1928 Walter Chrysler was in search of a way to advertise what it was he was producing and selling, the automobile. Now at this time, the auto was still a novelty. The invention had the interest of people, yet not many were actually driving them. Chrysler had an idea, and saw the opportunity to put forth that idea in another relatively new invention, the skyscraper. At the time, he thought that if his company had the tallest, and the most magnificent and incredible building on the block, it would bring notice to the company and to the cars. It would also serve to bring notice and to symbolize the wealth and the power of not only his company, or the city of Manhattan, but of the entire country of America. He hired the architect who could do just that, a pioneer in the new world of skyscrapers, William van Alen.
Fifty years prior to this commission, there were no skyscrapers. Walls had been built with bricks, and without the steel armature, and the bricks carried the weight of the building. With the metal infrastructure, or skeleton, buildings were provided with the strength necessary to hold a building of that size up and to keep it standing over time. This innovation was created by Williamle Baron Jenney , who put this to use creating the tallest building in the country at the time in 1885, the first skyscraper, in Chicago. A 10 story building for an insurance company.
Now the Chrysler building was not revolutionary in terms of the construction, but it served to reform the way people considered what a building could look like. It is an interesting fact that nothing used to make the walls, the stone or the cement, none of it serves to hold the building up, it is all completely held up by this inner metal skeleton. The building was finished in 1930, and just barely surpassed the previously taller Bank of Manhattan, to become the tallest building in the world, with 77 floors. Now days, in 2009, it no longer carries that title, but it is the one building in the world that most architects and designers agree upon, and they agree upon the beauty of the patterns, the spire atop the building, and the incredible, decorated nature of this piece of artwork.
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