Group that demoted Willis Tower may strip another skyscraper title
Was the first skyscraper built in Chicago?
For decades, the answer has tended to be “yes,” with many architectural historians, critics and tour guides (especially those from Chicago) citing the longgone Home Insurance Building as Skyscraper No. 1.
The building, a 10-story pile of red brick and granite that rose in 1885 at the corner of LaSalle and Adams streets, is “considered the world’s first skyscraper,” says a text panel at the Chicago Architecture Center. ” Even nonChicago publications, like The Guardian and history.com, continue to call the building “first.”
But skeptics have long contended that the Home Insurance Building, which was demolished in 1931, doesn’t deserve such adulation and now the Chicagobased skyscraper group that stripped Sears (now Willis) Tower of its world’s tallest building crown is considering taking another title away from Chicago.
At a recent symposium organized by the group, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the skeptics reiterated arguments they’ve been making for years: New York and Chicago already had office buildings of 10 or more stories before the Home Insurance went up, and those buildings were popularly known as skyscrapers. Moreover, the skeptics said, the Home Insurance Building didn’t really mark a decisive shift in tall building design.
As a result, the Home Insurance Building’s once-solid pioneering status — architecture’s equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first flight — seems wobbly, as if it were teetering on a pedestal. What building might replace it as the first skyscraper? Who knows.
“Although it looks likely that Home Insurance will eventually not be deemed the first skyscraper, we do not yet have the agreed criteria in place for what could be considered the first skyscraper — and that discussion is likely to continue for a few months,” Antony Wood, chief executive officer of the tall buildings council, wrote to me in an email Tuesday.
The council, a nonprofit that analyzes the design, construction and management of skyscrapers worldwide, organized
the symposium, “First Skyscrapers/Skyscraper Firsts,” at the Chicago Architecture Center as part of its 10th World Congress.
There are, perhaps, better things for the council to do than to engage in another highly publicized exercise of height hairsplitting. In 1996, the organization ruled that Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers would beat out Sears Tower for the world’s tallest building title because Petronas’ spires counted in official height measurements while antennas like those atop Sears did not. In 2013, it decided that New York’s One World Trade Center would top the Chicago giant, which in 2009 was renamed Willis Tower, as the nation’s tallest building because the stripped-down mast atop the lower Manhattan tower still counted as a spire.
While such disputes generate headlines, they don’t address the impact that skyscrapers make on both the urban environment and the environment of a warming planet. (Building construction and operations account for more than a third of global energy use, according to the International Energy Agency.) Still, it’s human nature to want to know “which came first?”
Chicagoans may be particularly invested in the outcome, not only because of civic pride, but because the city markets itself as the birthplace of the skyscraper. That helps draw tourists who fill the tour boats that ply the Chicago River, including those run by the Chicago Architecture Center. And being from the birthplace of the skyscraper — rather than, say, Minneapolis — lends cachet to the city’s architects as they pursue big-ticket skyscraper commissions in boom countries like China.
Yet divining the identity of the “first skyscraper” and even the definition of “skyscraper” will be no simple task.
There’s general agreement that a skyscraper is a building of considerable height and that it must contain multiple floors. Yet things get murkier once the question of “first” comes up and civic boosterism enters the equation.
New York’s proponents have long stressed that great height is the defining feature of skyscrapers. They point to the fact that lower Manhattan had tall office buildings on its Newspaper Row, like the clock towertopped New York Tribune Building (a 260 footer), as early as 1875 — 10 years before the Home Insurance Building was completed.
But although the New York towers used commercial passenger elevators, which had been around since the 1850s, they were constructed of load-bearing masonry. Their thick exterior walls likely prevented ample amounts of natural light from entering offices. The walls also chewed up valuable interior space. The buildings were, in essence, dinosaurs — large and impressive, but, structurally at least, exemplars of a dying breed.
In contrast, Jenney’s Home Insurance Building
did employ advanced structural technology, though the extent to which it did so is subject to debate. Jenney, who had earned the rank of major in the Civil War during his hitch with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, appears to have improvised the structure, as he would have done when he designed fortifications at Shiloh and Vicksburg.
The architect used cast iron and wrought iron for his internal structure, switching to newly available steel for the upper floors. (It was the the first use of the material in a building.) Windows could thus be larger, bringing in more natural light — a crucial economic advantage in an era of primitive electric lighting.
The combination of structural innovation and flexible, light-filled interiors is said to have influenced future Chicago architectural giants who apprenticed in Jenney’s office, among them Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, William Holabird and Martin Roche. All were key players in creating the muscular, structurally expressive office buildings that historians would come to call the first Chicago School of Architecture.
Yet the Home Insurance Building also relied on old technology. Its base was made of load-bearing granite. Its party walls were of brick. The walls fronting the street, a mix of brick and iron, were not selfsupporting “curtains” of glass and lightweight terra cotta, an advance that would be perfected in later Chicago School high-rises like the Reliance and Fisher buildings.
Accordingly, the late architectural historian Carl Condit used the term “proto-skyscraper” to describe the Home Insurance Building, saying it paved the way for steel-framed skyscrapers that would weigh far less, rise much higher and be far more functional than their loadbearing predecessors.
In his influential 1964 book, “The Chicago School of Architecture,” Condit observed that the Home Insurance Building was “the major step in the conversion of a building from a crustacean with its armor of stone to a vertebrate clothed only in a light skin.”
Other writers, less careful than Condit, started calling the Home Insurance Building the first skyscraper.
Yet 22 years later, Condit refuted that label.
In a 1986 interview, he said, the term “first skyscraper” rested “on an unacceptably narrow idea of what constitutes a highrise commercial building.” Historians had paid too much attention to structure and form, he said, and not enough to such overlooked factors as elevators and adequate heating and lighting systems. Without them, tall buildings could not command premium rents.
Likewise, speakers at the symposium stressed how advances in foundation technology made possible both the earliest skyscrapers and later ones, like the Empire State Building, that rose to previously unthinkable heights.
Referring to the raftlike concrete and steel foundations that allowed tall buildings on Chicago’s marshy soil, Ken DeMuth, a partner at Pappageorge Haymes Partners said: “Before Chicago had big shoulders, it had big feet.” The firm turned the 17-story Old Colony Building of 1894 into apartments in 2015.
Condit’s reversal may have reflected the rise of postmodernism, which de-emphasized the modernist idea that a building’s internal structure should drive its exterior form. But whatever caused his shift, it buoyed the view of skeptics like Gerald Larson, a University of Cincinnati professor who has been questioning the Home Insurance Building’s skyscraper bona fides since the 1980s.
At last week’s symposium, Larson began his presentation with a red cross-out sign over a photo of the building. “I’m not anti-Chicago,” he said, informing the audience that he grew up in Waukegan and worshipped Cubs star Ernie Banks.
Wood, the head of the tall buildings council, said in his email that the organization has not ruled out the Home Insurance Building as the first skyscraper. But the status Jenney’s building once enjoyed now appears to be endangered.
To clarify the council’s search for the first skyscraper, Wood wrote in the email, the group will recognize a number of firsts, like the “first skyscraper with an all-steel frame.”
It also plans to explore the early years of the world’s tallest multistory buildings, regardless of whether they have been (or will be) classified as skyscrapers. The latter effort could cover tall buildings with load-bearing masonry walls, like the first half of Chicago’s Monadnock Building and the demolished Montauk Building, which some writers have called the first skyscraper.
As the investigation progresses, this much is clear: Whether or not the Home Insurance Building holds onto its first skyscraper title, Chicago has a cache of early skyscrapers that no other city can catch. Clustered in the South Loop, these buildings reveal how rapid urbanization, an economic boom and a series of technological innovations pushed office buildings to once-unthinkable heights.
Even so, assigning the adjective “first” to a single building is a fraught exercise, one that Carol Willis, director of New York’s Skyscraper Museum and a participant in the symposium, called “the fallacy of the first.”
Highlighting a single building ignores the reality that American skyscrapers came into existence through evolution, not revolution. While there were decisive moments along the way, progress entailed steps and missteps, inspiration and improvisation, and an intense rivalry between Chicago and New York.
While the early skyscrapers soared, there may be no architectural equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ first flight.