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The Vertical City as an Unintended Consequence

by Sandy Ikeda
Sun, 15 Jun 2008 at 3:10 AM

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In an earlier post on "Elevating Culture," I quoted this from Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker article: "Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator."

Now, steel-frame construction solved the engineering problem of how to build skyscrapers within the confines of a street grid by making it possible to build up without having to build out. It transformed weight-bearing walls into decorative facades. The safety elevator solved the economic problem by making the (n + 1)st floor of a building more valuable than the nth floor, where n > 2.

Thomas Bender (whose "The Unfinished City" I've referenced before) points out that even by the late 19th century both the inhabitants of New York and the architects who built for them shared a "cultural resistance to verticality or height" and an "essentially horizontal perception of urban form." The skyscraper was instead born in Chicago, and Louis Sullivan was its fountainhead.

But in New York, the elevator "did not suggest an unlimited number of floors." Rather, it "fitted into a frame of cultural or architectural perception that stressed not new possibilities of verticality but rather a continuation of the traditional five-story city." Indeed, the first building here to have an Otis elevator was the Haughwout Building, built in 1857 and still standing at the corner of Broome and Broadway — and only 5 stories tall.

Thus, while the steel frame and the elevator enabled New York to surpass Chicago as the iconic vertical city, it was (as Adam Smith's teacher Adam Ferguson might have described it) the result of human action but not of human design.

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