Why build the Empire State Building? Why build the tallest building in the world? Much of what we know about the Empire State Building centers on its size, which admittedly is difficult to communicate through words alone. Approaching the building on foot in Manhattan from a distance is probably the only way to take in the enormity of it. The phenomenal human effort required to construct the building becomes much clearer when you stand at its base and cast your glance skyward in a vain effort to see the top. The famous mooring mast, the most recognizable feature of the...

The history of Manhattan since the mid-nineteenth century is a chronicle of the finite supply of land, rising real estate prices, and the role of these two forces in shaping the form and skyline of the island.¹ Mona Domosh describes New York at the close of the nineteenth century as already the “ultimate material expression of a capitalist city,” and notes that “its mercantile and financial elite class continued a never-ending search for outlets for conspicuous consumption.”² As it is for the whole of Manhattan, so too is it for 350 Fifth Avenue.³ To understand a building as something more...

In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the board of Empire State, Incorporated, was in the midst of the frenzied preparations for the construction of their skyscraper. These seven men, Al Smith, John Raskob, Pierre du Pont, Ellis P. Earle, Louis G. Kaufman, Michael Friedsam, and August Heckscher, were busy that fall. They had already purchased the Waldorf-Astoria, hired builders and architects, demolished the old hotel, applied for the necessary mortgages, and begun bankrolling the project. The board then commissioned H. Hamilton Weber (Renting Supervisor of the New York Central Building) to prepare a real estate survey to...

The Empire State Building is without doubt, to use a memorable phrase coined by Cass Gilbert, “a machine that makes the land pay,” and therefore it must be understood not as a final destination for capital but rather as a location for it to undergo, as Immanuel Wallerstein calls it, self-expansion.¹ This fact, however, need not obscure the reality that politics played a key role in the building’s creation and operation, and that politics affected whether people in New York and across the nation saw the Empire State as a great proof of American prosperity and ingenuity, or an empty...

Looking at the 1950s, and the Seagram Building, it is worthwhile to survey briefly the broader architecture culture of the era. As it had in the 1930s, modern architecture served as a medium that could convey a variety of messages. At the same time, political, economic, and cultural shifts around the world profoundly altered the architectural landscape of the United States. In the year of the MoMA exhibit, Soviet modern architecture was featured in the American magazine Soviet Russia Today as a demonstration that “Socialism is no longer a dream, but a living reality.”¹ Yet such a definition of modern...

In the years following the “conspicuously American” Empire State Building, modern architecture in the United States underwent a period of transformation with the introduction of the European-influenced international style. The international style, in turn, was defined by its promoters at institutions like MoMA as a reaction against skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, which they condemned as a reflection of the “architectural taste of real estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers.”¹ Looking today at the Empire State Building and the Seagram Building, we move from a building that celebrated the republican convergence of business and the higher aspirations of...

How did corporate and business concerns shape the creation of the Seagram Building? A revealing set of company memos and plans created in 1951, three years before the unveiling of the Pereira & Luckman design, under the aegis of “Project Skytop” help answer that question. Skytop was the internal nickname for a committee convened to develop the “Program for Development of Building to House the Seagram Companies.”¹ Documents produced by the committee included lists of potential architects, studies of “various [building] schemes showing building size and comparable financial set up,” and a memo assessing Frank Lloyd Wright’s difficult disposition and unreasonable...

New York during the 1950s underwent a variety of profound transformations, not the least of them a dramatic boom in construction. The Great Depression and later the economic restrictions imposed by World War II meant that building activity was nearly nonexistent in the city for almost two decades. The construction slowdown, Carol Krinsky writes, “brought an end to many conservative, long-established firms, leaving the field open to younger ones.”¹ Architecture firms were not only fewer and younger, they were ready to embrace modern architecture to a far greater degree than their conservative predecessors. Transatlantic émigrés took teaching positions at architecture...

Trade in all its vicissitudes is a defining force in the history of Manhattan. Representatives of the Dutch West India Company arrived in 1625 with the goal of establishing a trade outpost. In the twentieth century trade helped generate the profits that found material expression in skyscrapers and ordered the labor of the men and women who filled those tall buildings. The Empire State Building provided office space for small-scale enterprises engaged in trade at both the domestic and international scale. The Seagram Building housed a growing multinational corporation that grew into a colossus by purchasing companies around the globe...

To get to the heart of how and why the World Trade Center came to bear so many interpretations, it helps to know something about the things themselves, rather than the symbols they are now. The initial discussions that led to the project began in 1955. Construction stretched into the early 1970s, and the WTC did not turn a profit until 1981. At completion, the twin towers replaced the Empire State Building as the tallest skyscrapers in New York City and the world. Their total cost, more than $1 billion, dwarfed that of the Seagram Building, until then the most...

Until Minoru Yamasaki was hired as architect, the World Trade Center was a project guided entirely by a coterie of well-connected individuals, firmly ensconced among the power elite of New York City. The architects on the Port Authority’s advisory board, known as David Rockefeller’s “genius committee,” would not unreasonably have imagined they were likely candidates for the job that went instead to Yamasaki.¹ They had, after all, been involved with the planning and design of the World Trade Center up to that point, and they were all architects with established reputations and substantial experience working on large scale projects in...