The skyscraper, which was to find its full expression in New York, was actually conceived in Chicago.31 The history of this conception is an absorbing story with its own tragic hero, Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924). Sullivan was born in Boston, the son of a musically gifted mother of German-Swiss-French stock and a father, Patrick, who taught dance. Louis, who fancied himself as a poet and wrote a lot of bad verse, grew up loathing the chaotic architecture of his home city, but studied the subject not far away, across the Charles River at MIT.32 A round-faced man with brown eyes, Sullivan had acquired an imposing self-confidence even by his student days, revealed in his dapper suits, the pearl studs in his shirts, the silver-topped walking cane that he was never without. He travelled around Europe, listening to Wagner as well as looking at buildings, then worked briefly in Philadelphia and the Chicago office of William Le Baron Jenney, often cited as the father of the skyscraper for introducing a steel skeleton and elevators in his Home Insurance Building (Chicago, 1883a–5).33 Yet it is doubtful whether this building – squat by later standards – really qualifies as a skyscraper. In Sullivan’s view the chief property of a skyscraper was that it ‘must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from top to bottom it is a unit without a single dissenting line.’34
In 1876 Chicago was still in a sense a frontier town. Staying at the Palmer House Hotel, Rudyard Kipling found it ‘a gilded rabbit warren … full of people talking about money and spitting,’ but it offered fantastic architectural possibilities in the years following the great fire of 1871, which had devastated the city core.35 By 1880 Sullivan had joined the office of Dankmar Adler and a year later became a full partner. It was this partnership that launched his reputation, and soon he was a leading figure in the Chicago school of architecture.
Though Chicago became known as the birthplace of the skyscraper, the notion of building very high structures is of indeterminable antiquity. The intellectual breakthrough was the realisation that a tall building need not rely on masonry for its support.*
The metal-frame building was the answer: the frame, iron in the earlier examples, steel later on, is bolted (later riveted for speedier construction) together to steel plates, like shelves, which constitute the floors of each storey. On this structure curtain walls could be, as it were, hung. The wall is thus a cladding of the building, rather than truly weight bearing. Most of the structural problems regarding skyscrapers were solved very early on. Therefore, as much of the debate at the turn of the century was about the aesthetics of design as about engineering. Sullivan passionately joined the debate in favour of a modern architecture, rather than pastiches and sentimental memorials to the old orders. His famous dictum, ‘Form ever follows function,’ became a rallying cry for modernism, already mentioned in connection with the work of Adolf Loos in Vienna.36
Sullivan’s early masterpiece was the Wainwright Building in Saint Louis. This, again, was not a really high structure, only ten storeys of brick and terracotta, but Sullivan grasped that intervention by the architect could ‘add’ to a building’s height.37 As one architectural historian wrote, the Wainwright is ‘not merely tall; it is about being tall – it is tall architecturally even more than it is physically.’38 If the Wainwright Building was where Sullivan found his voice, where he tamed verticality and showed how it could be controlled, his finest building is generally thought to be the Carson Pirie Scott department store, also in Chicago, finished in 1903–4. Once again this is not a skyscraper as such – it is twelve storeys high, and there is more emphasis on the horizontal lines than the vertical. But it was in this building above all others that Sullivan displayed his great originality in creating a new kind of decoration for buildings, with its ‘streamlined majesty,’ ‘curvilinear ornament’ and ‘sensuous webbing.’39 The ground floor of Carson Pirie Scott shows the Americanisation of the art nouveau designs Sullivan had seen in Paris: a Metro station turned into a department store.40
Frank Lloyd Wright was also experimenting with urban structures. Judging by the photographs – which is all that remains since the edifice was torn down in 1950 – his Larkin Building in Buffalo, on the Canadian border, completed in 1904, was at once exhilarating, menacing, and ominous.41 (John Larkin built the Empire State Building in New York, the first to have more than 100 floors.) An immense office space enclosed by ‘a simple cliff of brick,’ its furnishings symmetrical down to the last detail and filled with clerks at work on their long desks, it looks more like a setting for automatons than, as Wright himself said, ‘one great official family at work in day-lit, clean and airy quarters, day-lit and officered from a central court.’42 It was a work with many ‘firsts’ that are now found worldwide. It was air-conditioned and fully fireproofed; the furniture – including desks and chairs and filing cabinets – was made of steel and magnesite; its doors were glass, the windows double-glazed. Wright was fascinated by materials and the machines that made them in a way that Sullivan was not. He built for the ‘machine age,’ for standardisation. He became very interested also in the properties of ferro-concrete, a completely new building material that revolutionised design. Steel was pioneered in Britain as early as 1851 in the Crystal Palace, a precursor of the steel-and-glass building, and reinforced concrete (béton arme) was invented in France in the same year, by François Hennebique. But it was only in the United States, with the building of skyscrapers, that these materials were exploited to the full. In 1956 Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper for Chicago.43
Further down the eastern seaboard of the United States, 685 miles away to be exact, lies Kill Devil Hill, near the ocean banks of North Carolina. In 1903 it was as desolate as Manhattan was crowded. A blustery place, with strong winds gusting in from the sea, it was conspicuous by the absence of the umbrella pine trees that populate so much of the state. This was why it had been chosen for an experiment that was to be carried out on 17 December that year – one of the most exciting ventures of the century, destined to have an enormous impact on the lives of many people. The skyscraper was one way of leaving the ground; this was another, and far more radical.
At about half past ten that morning, four men from the nearby lifesaving station and a boy of seventeen stood on the hill, gazed down to the field which lay alongside, and waited. A pre-arranged signal, a yellow flag, had been hoisted nearby, at the village of Kitty Hawk, to alert the local coastguards and others that something unusual might be about to happen. If what was supposed to occur did occur, the men and the boy were there to serve as witnesses. To say that the sea wind was fresh was putting it mildly. Every so often the Wright brothers – Wilbur and Orville, the object of the observers’ attention – would disappear into their shed so they could cup their freezing fingers over the stove and get some feeling back into them.44