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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 15
Lesson 4: New York skyscrapers & landmarksGilbert, Woolworth Building
A New Skyline
Given the colossal buildings that now cover downtown Manhattan, it can be hard to understand just how distinctive Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building appeared in relation to the skyline when it was new, one hundred years ago.
Skyscrapers emerged in Chicago the 1880s as a way to concentrate commercial office functions within the limited space downtown. New engineering technologies like safety elevators and steel-frames allowed Chicago's buildings to stretch across massive city blocks and rise to ten or twelve stories high. In New York after the turn of the century, a second generation of skyscrapers translated the Chicago School's innovations into an entirely different, even more monumental aesthetic. The Woolworth, standing on Broadway at the southwest corner of City Hall Park, is a key example of the New York style that developed in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Frank Woolworth conceived of his new corporate headquarters as the ultimate advertising campaign, a luxurious tower that would reflect his own personal wealth and the success of his five-and-dime stores. Perhaps viewing himself as an heir to the great merchant princes of medieval Italy, Woolworth sought bold architecture and economic advantage, including rental income from tenants. Woolworth hired the architect Cass Gilbert, then known primarily for his Beaux-Arts style civic buildings and art museums, to turn this dream into reality.
World’s Tallest
Gilbert utilized the most advanced steel-frame construction techniques of the time allowing the Woolworth to soar 57 stories to 792 feet—the world’s tallest building until 1930.
In contrast to the relative horizontality of Chicago skyscrapers and the sharp divisions between base and tower of earlier New York skyscrapers like the Singer Building (1908), every aspect of the Woolworth’s composition and decoration is oriented up, creating a continuous vertical thrust.
The tower sits flush on the Broadway side of the large V-shaped block that contains City Hall Park. This means you can view Woolworth from a distance and see its full height with an unobstructed view, rare in such a densely built area. The result is that the tower seems to move endlessly upwards. The building’s white-glazed terra-cotta tiles accentuate the piers that run from base to top with few interruptions from cornices or the window spandrels.
Gargoyles
The building’s decorative neo-Gothic program only adds to this sense of monumentality. On the exterior, ornate sculptural arches, finials, and gargoyles over-scaled enough to be read from street-level, refer directly to European medieval architecture, and draw the eye towards the heavens in the same manner as a High Gothic cathedral.
Inside the building’s barrel-vaulted lobby, walls covered with lavish mosaics and stained glass allude to even earlier examples of Christian art and architecture. Yet, as contemporary critics noted, the Woolworth was a tribute not to religion, but to capitalism.
The form of the New York skyscraper would soon shift again with a 1916 zoning law. This regulation used a building's "footprint" to ensure that sunlight and breezes would reach the city’s narrow streets far below. The "1916 Setback Law" led to the “wedding cake” massing and streamlined style of the Chrysler Building (1930) and Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building (1933), among many others. Just as with Woolworth, skyscrapers continue to serve as important symbols for the corporations that commissioned them.
Essay by Dr. Margaret Herman
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Want to join the conversation?
- Does the interior of the building still look like the postcard shown at the end of this essay? The interior shown in the postcard reminds me of Anton Gaudi of Barcelona with similar colors and the use of tile. Does anyone know if Gilbert was influenced by Gaudi?(2 votes)
- The building has been getting a lot of press recently, not so much for the lobby - which still looks amazing - but more for the 34 newly built, upper floor condos.
CurbedNY has published these beautifyl photos of the building as it is now (May 2014) :
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/05/12/ogle_the_woolworth_buildings_stunning_rarely_open_lobby.php(5 votes)
- Is the Woolworth building related to the store Woolworths somehow?(2 votes)
- It was when built by Frank. For now, though,
"The building was owned by the Woolworth company for 85 years until 1998, when the Venator Group (formerly the F. W. Woolworth Company) sold it to the Witkoff Group for $155 million.[12] Until recently, that company kept a presence in the building through a Foot Locker store (Foot Locker is the successor to the Woolworth Company)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolworth_Building(1 vote)
- There are many laws in NYC now that would prohibit the demolition of buildings such as this one based on claims of "artistic and aesthetic heritage" for the City, but is it not ironic that many other buildings in the Woolworth's "footprint" would have needed to be demolished in order for the Woolworth itself to be constructed? The essay states that "the Woolworth was a tribute not to religion, but to capitalism.", but is it now a "tribute" to protectionist laws and "Crony-Capitalism"?(2 votes)
- Do you have any information for new and modern architecture and how they work?(0 votes)