York Skyscrapers Research Articles

From ascetic individualism to the dissolution of the self: A sociological approach to the religious symbolism of Chicago and New York skyscrapers

This article seeks to determine the link between the symbolic profile of North American skyscrapers and the features of North American culture, emphasizing the parallelism followed in the evolution of both. For this purpose, it resorts to a comprehensive or interpretative sociology combined with an incipient sociology of skyscrapers as a theoretical–methodological basis, complemented in turn with the notions of creativity and symbolism, resources through which the nuclear myths on which North American culture is sustained would become visible. The work reveals how the transformations in the style followed by American skyscrapers maintain a close relationship with the process of collapse of the original values proclaimed by American capitalism. So that the aesthetics characterized by a rationalist abstraction, perfectly fitted in the inaugural ascetic values of this first capitalism, would give way to an aesthetics of evanescent sign where an individuated consideration of the self would be given preeminence. In this sense, the work discovers how the symbology carried on the skyscrapers constitutes a first-level observatory in order to evidence the mutations that took place in the North American religiosity.

An individualism without individuals. A sociological approach to the capitalist symbolism of Chicago and New York skyscrapers

Starting from Comprehensive or Interpretive Sociology and the Sociology of skyscrapers, this article proposes as basic objectives to verify how the North American economic culture is showed in the symbolism of the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York and to verify the parallelism between the formal evolution of these buildings and the main economic transformations that have occurred in North American society in recent decades. In short, we will try to highlight the following symbolic questions: if the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York represent the defense of an American business culture marked by strong competitiveness and individualism; if they express the aesthetic transition from a capitalist rationalist architecture to another aesthetic where fiction, fantasy and spectacularity prevail; if this process is in tune with the transformation from an industrial capitalism to another of consumption and if it manifests itself through the decline of rationalist structural architectural elements towards others marked by glass, lightness, fluidity, liquidity and commodification; if the individualism that characterizes North American capitalism has also mutated in recent decades, that is, if from a primitive exaltation of autonomy as a core value of society, it drifts towards the cult of an individualized, privatized self disconnected from public space. Ultimately, it is about confirming the sociological utility of skyscrapers, understood as symbolic, economic, social and cultural objects.

Crafting sustainability in iconic skyscrapers: a system of building professions in transition?

This paper focuses on coordination, fragmentation, and the potential for transition in the system of building professions in the American construction industry. The paper relies mainly on local press coverage of three iconic New York skyscrapers—the Empire State Building (completed in 1931), the U.N. Secretariat (completed in 1952) and One World Trade Center (completed in 2014)— to compare how the roles of different building professionals are seen by and portrayed to the public eye over time. The historic cases show how different professional groups—builders in the 1930s, architects in the 1950s, and engineers in the 2010s—imbued each project with “sustainable” qualities appropriate for its time. Using a system of professions (Abbott 1988[r]) approach, the paper describes and discusses the implications of changes in societal interest from doing to designing in American skyscrapers. The paper concludes by arguing that greater coordination between doers and designers in the construction industry, of the kind exhibited in the early days of skyscrapers, would enable the social production of sustainable buildings. For this to happen, however, society would need to place a higher value on tangible outcomes compared to lofty goals..

Une voix de star française sur des images américaines: Fernandel dans L’Ennemi public n°1 (Verneuil, 1953)

In 1953 Henri Verneuil made L’Ennemi public n°1, a parody of the gangster film, located in New York, and with Fernandel as the star. This little-known film played on the incongruity of the star from the French Midi in the Big Apple, and on the contrast between two stereotypes, that of the Frenchman and of the gangster. It exemplifies Franco-American relations in the 1950s, focusing particularly on Fernandel’s voice in the context of Hollywood’s visual universe. This article examines the articulation between a French voice and American images so as to identify the functions of the oral performance of a star such as Fernandel in the post-war context. L’Ennemi public n°1 works on the principle that language is as attractive as New York skyscrapers; it also uses Fernandel’s vernacular to reorient the cultural identity of the film; and, by using an old tradition of orality in French cinema, it introduces the spectator of 1953 into two new universes: the universe of mass consumption, and the hybrid global universe of the cinema emerging in the post-war period.En 1953, Henri Verneuil réalise L’Ennemi public n°1, un film de gangsters parodique situé à New York, avec Fernandel dans le rôle principal. Ce film méconnu joue sur l’incongruité de la présence de la star méridionale dans la mégalopole américaine et sur le contraste comique entre le Frenchman et la figure du gangster. Mais il constitue aussi une illustration exemplaire des échanges France/Amérique dans les années 1950, dont la particularité est de mettre en rapport la voix de Fernandel et l’univers visuel de Hollywood. Cet article examine l’articulation entre la voix française et les images américaines, afin d’identifier les fonctions de la performance orale d’une star comme Fernandel dans le contexte spécifique de l’après-guerre. L’Ennemi public n°1 assimile le langage à une attraction comparable aux buildings de New York; il utilise également la parole vernaculaire de Fernandel pour réorienter l’identité culturelle du film; et il parvient en utilisant une situation d’oralité ancienne dans le cinéma français à faciliter l’entrée du spectateur de 1953 dans deux univers nouveaux différents : l’univers de la consommation de masse, et l’univers cinématographique hybride et «mondialisé» qui émerge à cette période.

Architectural Morphospace: Mapping Worlds of Built Forms

A method is proposed for plotting the plans of a large variety of rectangular built forms across a two-dimensional ‘morphospace’ of possibilities. The plans are enumerated by means of a technique of binary coding, such that similar shapes are grouped within distinct areas of this morphospace. Some applications to a geometrical history of building types are sketched, with examples from 19th-century pavilion hospitals, English elementary schools, and early New York skyscrapers. The purpose is to provide classification of built forms, to understand their interrelationships in a systematic way, and to see how building types have followed characteristic ‘morphological trajectories’ through this space of forms. It is a tool with which to approach the history of architecture from a geometrical point of view. It is not primarily conceived as an aid to design: nevertheless the paper concludes with some brief speculations about possible implications for design methods, using genetic algorithms.

Painting Big—O'Keeffe's Manhattan

In 1995 the directors of the Georgia O’Keeff e Foundation gave the Smithsonian American Art Museum a striking painting entitled Manhattan. Created by O’Keeff e in 1932, it is loud, large, and the only canvas of New York skyscrapers that she or any other modernist seems to have painted with blossoms fl oating on its surface. Most scholars knew the work only as a black-and-white reproduction and believed Manhattan to be lost or destroyed. But all along it had remained in O’Keeff e’s personal collection and only came to light when her estate was available to study.1 Th e Museum of Modern Art in New York had commissioned the painting for a 1932 exhibition, Murals by American Painters and Photographers. In an eff ort to help modern artists obtain mural commissions, the museum asked sixty-fi ve painters and photographers to work up designs for wall-sized decorations. Th e painters were each asked to create a twenty-by-forty-eight-inch mockup of a hypothetical mural. Th ey were then invited to develop one piece of the overall design into a painting seven feet high by four feet wide. Th e installation featured the large panel by each artist hanging above the much smaller design of the whole mural. Artists had but six weeks to prepare their submissions. Like most of the painters, O’Keeff e came up with a triptych, a trio of equally sized panels. Each featured a diff erent New York cityscape. She enlarged the middle panel into the more fi nished painting, and that is the work now at SAAM.2 Th e painting documents Georgia O’Keeff e’s unfulfi lled desire in the late 1920s and 1930s to secure a mural commission. During a period when murals were routinely being commissioned for public buildings—especially by the government—she wanted to participate. “I have such a desire to paint something for a particular place—and paint it big,” she wrote to a friend in 1929.3 On the heels of the Museum of Modern Art’s mural exhibition (and perhaps because of it), O’Keeff e did receive a commission to paint a mural in the Ladies’ Powder Room at Rockefeller Center, but the design was to be of fl owers rather than skyscrapers. Th e story is well known: after a host of problems, many of them between O’Keeff e and Stieglitz, she withdrew, and the commission ultimately went to Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Th en in 1936, when she let it be known that she would like to paint a mural for the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, the director there rejected the idea. O’Keeff e’s only “big” painting in the 1930s other than Manhattan was commissioned by Elizabeth Arden. Th at six-by-seven-foot canvas of jimsonweed fl owers decorated the Elizabeth Arden Gymnasium Moderne on Fifth Avenue and is today in the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.4 Much later, in the 1950s, when the New York School painters were working on a large scale, O’Keeff e began to increase the size of many of her paintings, working often with four-by-sevenfoot canvases. In 1965, when she was seventy-eight years old, she made her decadeslong dream come true. Taking matters into her own hands, she created her biggest painting ever, Sky above Clouds IV, an eight-by-twenty-four-foot portrait of clouds that now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. In composing Manhattan, O’Keeff e pushed her own stylistic envelope. Not only is the canvas twice as large as any of her other cityscapes, she also used an unconventional palette.5 Pitting pink against red, mauve against blue, black against white, the painting off ers up a jazz-age brashness and surface tempo we seldom see in her work. O’Keeff e also infused the piece with cubist and futurist rhetoric, two vocabularies she rarely engaged as methodically as she does here. She formulated the central skyscrapers

From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap

HE graveyard at Trinity Church is a veritable who's who of eighteenth-century American heroes. At the corner of Broadway and Wall streets in Manhattan, Trinity Churchyard was the burial ground for many of early America's famous politicians, generals, inventors, and magnates. The gravestones of John Peter Zenger, Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Horatio Gates, Robert Fulton, and John Jacob Astor litter this urban cemetery now dwarfed by New York's skyscrapers. In the shadow of these giants lies another grave, that of Michael Cresap, a militia captain from western Maryland who died in New York in October 1775. Cresap was an unusual figure to be buried with full military honors in one of the most prestigious colonial burial grounds: his notoriety came from his expertise in killing Indians, especially for murdering the family of Mingo Indian Chief Logan in the Ohio valley the summer before. How, then, did the whom Thomas Jefferson labeled a man infamous for the many murders he has committed on the frontier get to Trinity?1 The answer lies in the particular needs of the revolutionary project itself. As colonial rebels watched by the candid world, Whig leaders had to initiate and shape interpretations that explained what they were doing and, ultimately, who they were, a process that largely took place

Charles Sheeler's imprecise precisionism

In this article I address the significance of a series of images of New York skyscrapers fundamental to the work of American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965). The article examines three works – a photograph, a drawing and a painting – produced between 1919–23 of the same scene: the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan. I argue that these images introduce imprecisions that disrupt the notion of Sheeler as the pre-eminent Precisionist artist. Following aspects of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, I suggest that Sheeler's works adopt the language of rationalization whilst remaining critical of it. As such, the more positive conceptions of Sheeler's skyscraper works are juxtaposed against the actuality of the imprecision in the works, a dialectical move that unveils a negative critique of the rationalized culture of American modernity.

9/11

9/11 Neil Leach (bio) Walter Benjamin makes a striking observation about the capacity of certain dramatic events to act like a flash bulb and imprint particular architectural environments on the "photosensitive" plate of our minds. It is as though buildings sink into the recesses of our consciousness as a form of background landscape—almost unnoticeable because of their very familiarity—unless some event happens there that leaves them indelibly imprinted on our minds, such as a tragic accident or a death in the family. Anyone can observe that the duration for which we are exposed to impressions has no bearing on their fate in memory. Nothing prevents us keeping rooms in which we have spent twenty-four hours or less clearly in our memory, and forgetting others in which we have passed months. It is not, therefore, due to insufficient exposure if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases when the half-light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room's image on the plate. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we are beside ourselves, and, while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. [Benjamin, One-Way Street 342–43] The events of September 11 seem to have had a very similar effect on the twin towers of the World Trade Center.1 The twin towers had been a prominent part of the familiar New York skyline, but they remained somewhat anonymous. This in part was a result of their architecture. Although clearly the tallest buildings in New York, the twin towers were relatively featureless, and, as individual buildings, did not seem to capture the public imagination as did the Empire State Building with its iconic associations with King Kong, or the Chrysler Building with its splendid art deco ornamentation. They were, in Rem Koolhaas's terms, a perfect example of the lessons of "Manhattanism" unlearnt [291]. The exteriors of Manhattan skyscrapers, which had once conveyed so vividly their rich and diverse occupancy, had become increasingly homogenized, so [End Page 75] that they concealed that diversity. Indeed the deep load-bearing mullions of the twin towers, designed—or so it was thought—to withstand the impact of a 747 jet, and also to allow the interiors to be column free, helped both to obscure any impression of what was going on inside the buildings and also to obscure the view out.2 Moreover, through their sheer scale the twin towers were an example of a radical approach to urbanism, the ultimate response to Le Corbusier's judgment on New York skyscrapers, which he criticized for being too small and too numerous. In their architectural language the towers reportedly were inspired by the minimalism of Mies van der Rohe, but somehow lacked any of his sensitivity [Darton 115]. And certainly their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, had a reputation, following the demolition in 1972 of his Pruitt-Igoe housing project, which had failed on sociological grounds, of not being the most sensitive of designers. Eric Darton goes even so far as to describe their aesthetic impression as "terroristic," and compares the insensitivity of the design and what they represented in sociological terms to the insensitivity of those terrorists who attempted to blow up the twin towers in 1993.3 Not everyone took such a negative stance. Indeed the towers had their vociferous supporters, such as Ada Louise Huxtable, and yet it would probably be fair to say that they remained curiously anonymous within the eyes of the general public. Of course, the towers played an important role in the social fabric of New York—any vast structure that accommodates so much office space cannot fail to do so—and, on occasions, had caught the world's imagination, such as when French high-wire artist...

Dollars and Lipstick: The United States Through the Eyes of African Women

AbstractIn their quest for material well-being Cameroonian women see the United States as a country of virtually boundless opportunities. It is Eldorado, offering chances of earning money by selling cosmetics that are guaranteed not to have been tampered with. It is the new frontier, the Far West, where mothers send their children to study in the hope that a job-oriented education will make it easier for them to return home. It is the future, prefigured in the New York skyscrapers; Cameroonian mothers dream of bringing forth American children, and so giving tham a better chance of absorbing this world of the future. When the American dream is not accessible, the United States still offers an imaginary space where women reinvent the conditions of their existence by adopting some of the signs of American culture in their everyday life in the tropics. The use of lipstick thus appears as the symbol of a world-culture behind which hovers the giant image of the United States. The experiences of Cameroonian women can be extended to women in other African countries and, beyond, to the men of Africa, also suffering the precariousness of the present, faced with the same challenges of the future and engaged in the same quest for material well-being.

The child in the community: Nursing makes a difference

IT IS THE FOURTH DAY (September 15, 2001) after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and I wish to reflect on how terror affects children and their families and how young people can develop the intentions and skills of a terrorist. People in my community are calling the day of the attacks “9-1-1 Day” and are displaying flags to show solidarity with the nation in grief; they resolve to unite against further terrorist activity in the world. They have bought every flag available in the stores, to the extent that one of my neighbors was robbed of a flag in her yard—one that had been in the family for many years and may have been given to her family during World War II to honor a fallen son or daughter. Media coverage of these attacks has been intense, and I believe that nearly all of the nation’s children have seen planes crashing into the New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon in Washington, as well as people suffering injuries and running for their lives away from falling buildings. They have also seen emergency workers and volunteers helping the injured and their loved ones. These images have been broadcast many times over and are likely to stay in our collective memory forever. But how can such violence and terrorism become widespread? What does it take for perpetrators to develop such hatred that they skillfully cause pain and death among innocent people? How is it possible for someone, or a group of people, to steadily, patiently fly a jet into a building, knowing that it is loaded with incendiary fuels that will explode into a fireball upon impact, or carefully position a car bomb and detonate it to envelop a busy street in flames? How can political extremists organize people into cells, fill them with the zeal to take their own lives, and train them to successfully destroy and maim so cleverly that government efforts to safeguard citizens fail? What history of community life contributes to cultural pathways that promote hatred and revenge so powerful that annihilation, even genocide, becomes a theme of life over many years? Perhaps the example of Arab extremists emerging after the partitioning of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 can be instructive. The United Nations (UN) statement on the Question of Palestine (Department of Public Information, 1994) notes that, after Britain exited from its Mandate over Palestine in 1948, serious hostilities broke out between the Jewish population and Palestinian Arabs almost immediately. The occupation of lands designated for establishment of a Palestinian state by Jewish settlers on the West Bank and East Jerusalem provoked a staggering crisis when three-quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees and moved to camps and surrounding countries. A 1948 Partition Plan for Jewish and Arab territories in Palestine with cooperative governance of Jerusalem was rejected by Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab states on the grounds that it did not provide for the right of Palestinian Arabs to control their own destiny, a central provision of the UN Charter for all nations. The strong impetus for a Jewish state after the events of the Holocaust and the genocide of Jews and other groups added to the complexity of the political agendas of the region. Further hostilities and wars occurred over subsequent years, with burgeoning animosity among extremists on both sides of the Palestinian lands, exacerbating the will to exact revenge. Eventually, the West saw multiple assaults over the last half of the 20th century Dr. Monsen is an independently operating nursing education consultant. Address reprint requests and correspondence to Rita Black Monsen, DSN, MPH, RN, 119 Ledgerwood Circle, Hot Springs, AR 71913. Copyright 2002, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. 0882-5963/02/1701-0009$35.00/0 doi:10.1053/jpdn.2002.30462

Dollars and Lipstick: The United States through the Eyes of African Women

In their quest for material well-being Cameroonian women see the United States as a country of virtually boundless opportunities. It is Eldorado, offering chances of earning money by selling cosmetics that are guaranteed not to have been tampered with. It is the new frontier, the Far West, where mothers send their children to study in the hope that a job-oriented education will make it easier for them to return home. It is the future, prefigured in the New York skyscrapers; Cameroonian mothers dream of bringing forth American children, and so giving tham a better chance of absorbing this world of the future. When the American dream is not accessible, the United States still offers an imaginary space where women reinvent the conditions of their existence by adopting some of the signs of American culture in their everyday life in the tropics. The use of lipstick thus appears as the symbol of a world-culture behind which hovers the giant image of the United States. The experiences of Cameroonian women can be extended to women in other African countries and, beyond, to the men of Africa, also suffering the precariousness of the present, faced with the same challenges of the future and engaged in the same quest for material well-being.

Books are Basic: a Report from U.S.A.

At one moment we were being buffeted monstrously as we sat helplessly strapped in our seats, with the incessant sheet lightning giving us glimpses of the awful character of the storm clouds; and then the sky suddenly cleared and we were wheeling gently into Manhattan from the south. The plane tilted and we could see the Statue of Liberty dull copper green on its brown pedestal and the New York skyscrapers gap‐toothed in their wintry defence of the American continent. At La Guardia the bus company was on strike, and next morning we found pickets outside a chain of drug‐stores and in front of a large radio company (where the script writers were claiming that the corporation “could not sell them its story”). Even the Baghdad of the west had its troubles.