Upon its completion, the Evening Star in 1887 called the Sun Building “the most expensive private building ever erected in Washington,” in large part due to its steam-powered elevators, a rarity at the time. Mullet, an architect known for a number of government buildings across the US including the San Francisco Mint and the New York City Hall Post Office, which was later reviled by Modernists as “Mullet’s monstrosity.” Washington, DCĭetails: The eight-story, steel-frame structure was built to house the office of the Baltimore Sun in the nation’s capital. Status: The building was demolished to make room for a taller structure in 1931. The design ushered in its very own type of architecture, the Chicago School, which can bee seen among the many of the modern skyscrapers seen in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1890, two more floors were added to the building, bringing the height up to 180 feet or 54.9 meters. When it was first completed, the structure stood 10 stories tall with a total height of 138 feet or 42 meters. The outer columns of the building were covered in stone. The Home Insurance Building was constructed with the support of a fireproof metal frame on both its inside and outside, making it about a third of the weight of a stone structure of the same height. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city’s business district, concerns spread over wooden buildings and many city leaders and architects championed other materials such as stone, which proved heavy and dark the taller you built. Location: 30 N LaSalle Street (current site of Field Building)ĭetails: William Le Baron Jenney, an engineer, designed what many believe to be the world’s first skyscraper. Name of building: Home Insurance Building Take a look at the insurance buildings, office towers and newspaper headquarters that made up the first examples of skyscrapers across 15 major US metros, ordered by the year of completion: Chicago A number of them had concerned citizens clutching their pearls while others became immediate tourist sights. Though it wasn’t long before these early skyscrapers were dwarfed by new upstarts, it’s worth looking at some of the first examples of these structures. But the building trend caught on quickly and cities began to grow vertically across the country well into the early 20th century. The first skyscraper in the US, built in Chicago in 1885, was ten stories tall. And the more stories you added to a site, the thicker the walls and the darker the rooms would be, making for cramped and poorly lit quarters.Īs the Industrial Revolution ushered in new ways of mass-producing steel and iron cheaply, architects and engineers turned to the metals to help support taller structures. Stone and brick was better at standing up to flames, but architects who wanted to build higher had to rely on masonry to support the structure. In the 19th century, the reliance on wood as a building material became increasingly dangerous as the close confines of city life meant fires could wipe out blocks and blocks of buildings as they did in New York City in 1845 and Chicago in 1871. The definition of the word is a bit more murky, but we’re siding with the camp that insists a tall tower is not a skyscraper unless it is at least partially held up by steel or iron. The skyscraper as we know it is much more recent phenomenon. In the late 18th century, anything that stood out in size could be called a skyscraper, be it a particularly high horse or a very tall bonnet. The word skyscraper has been around long before the super-tall towers crowded the skylines of New York, Chicago or San Francisco.
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