Review: Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century by Benjamin Flowers

Abstract

Benjamin Flowers. Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 240 pp., 51 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780812241846 In this both sweeping and specific book, Benjamin Flowers describes the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, and the World Trade Center towers, explaining why developers undertook them and how personal ambitions influenced their designs. The son of an American State Department official, the author grew up in Bulgaria and Romania, countries where “everything was political” and new buildings symbolized allegiance to the Soviet Union (2). He sees architecture as the product of social forces and emphasizes these, instead of the stylistic and structural qualities that dominate many architectural studies. Flowers explains that the Empire State Building, the tallest in the world when it opened in 1931, occupies an unusually large midtown plot on Fifth Avenue that had been the site of a family farm, Mrs. William Astor's mansion, and then the first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Its primary developers—John Raskob, “an Irish-Catholic self-made millionaire” and Al Smith, a former “governor of New York, Democratic presidential candidate, and the best known Irish-American politician of his time”—were “outsider clients” (16). Building the skyscraper with Pierre and Coleman Dupont was a way to prove they had arrived. Flowers says little of the architects, Shreve Lamb & Harmon, except to note that the 102-story building was completed in just twenty months from the time they were contracted. Meanwhile, the …