Verticality, Part IX: Man Upends God
The needs of man become more important than the needs of God
This chapter is part of a series that compose the main verticality narrative. The full series is located here.
In the previous chapter, I touched on the difference between Hagia Sophia and the stylites. In the Hagia Sophia example, like every religious building discussed so far, the construction of a monumental space was meant to represent heaven on earth. The experience of visiting these spaces kept the human body at the surface, however. Visitors enter the building and gaze upward at magnificent feats of technology and wealth, but don’t actually leave the surface. In the stylites example, the human body was being raised up above the earth’s surface. This act of raising up the human body provides us with a counterpoint to the first example, and one which would become the focus of our subsequent efforts to escape the surface.
This wasn’t the first time we’d raised our bodies up above the surface, of course; far from it, in fact. I touched on the needs of density in the Heavens on Earth chapter with the example of the Ancient Roman insulae, and introduced the concept of building up instead of out. After the Renaissance, humanity would largely abandon our ambitions to recreate heaven on earth, and our focus would shift to raising up our bodies as far from the surface as possible. Rather than singular, largely empty spaces, our tallest and most ambitious constructions would become containers of stacked spaces, still with verticality as the ultimate goal. We were beginning to escape the surface.
Industrialization (circa 1750-1900)
With the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, the needs of God would be fully replaced by the needs of Ego. This resulted in a seismic shift in the built environment. Agustus Pugin crystallized this shift in his 1836 work Contrasts, in which he compared the skyline of a town before and after the Industrial Revolution.
Agustus Pugin’s Contrasts from 1836, showing a town skyline before the Industrial Revolution. The skyline is dominated by religious structures, with their towers and steeples found throughout the town.
Traditionally, the skyline of a town or village was dominated by towers and steeples of religious buildings. This can still be seen today in nearly all small towns or villages throughout the world. When approaching from a distance, the first thing one sees is the presence of religion. Steeples and towers push upwards above the rest of the buildings as if to announce the power and wealth of those who built them. Pugin shows a Catholic town in 1440 to illustrate this. It’s a romantic vision that we’re all familiar with.
Pugin’s Contrasts from 1836, showing the same town after the Industrial Revolution. The skyline is now dominated by smokestacks, and the town center is getting more dense, resulting in multi-story buildings lining the riverfront.
Contrast the 1440 example with The Same Town in 1840. As the town grew in population and industry took hold, the skyline transformed to feature smokestacks and taller buildings. Gone is the romantic skyline of steeples and slender towers. The needs of Ego have overtaken the needs of God. Pugin was lamenting this change, and was advocating for a return to a more bucolic and idyllic existence. This is the classic City Mouse Versus Country Mouse debate, and it’s one we’ll revisit in subsequent sections.[1]
Looking closer at the 1840 illustration, we can see the aforementioned shift of building up instead of out. Along the river are multi-level structures that begin to dominate the skyline below the smokestacks and steeples. Pugin is showing the shift from the lofty, empty spaces of religious architecture to secular buildings that are filled with stacked spaces. As we’ll see throughout the rest of this chapter, this shift would give way to taller and taller buildings.
Aggregation: The needs of density
Though we had been constructing multi-level buildings since Ancient Roman times, these types of buildings began to dominate our towns and cities. As populations grow, the need to densify grows as well, and taller buildings result. These structures are essentially creating ‘new land’ for the city by stacking spaces on top of one another. A small lot of land with a ten-story building on it can provide much more area than the same plot with a one-story building because of the stacked spaces. This ‘new land’ allows more people to exist in a smaller area, which allows populations to grow and concentrate without taking up as much land area.
One fascinating example is the city of Shibam in Yemen. Referred to as the Manhattan of the Desert, the city is famous for its concentration of tower blocks built of mud brick. These tower blocks are a consequence of the defensive walls surrounding the city. As discussed in detail in the Global Threads chapter, walls were a common method of defense for towns and cities in Medieval times, but they leave the residents with a finite amount of land on which to build. This restriction of available land forced the residents to build up instead of out as the population grew. What results are narrow, canyon-like streets and a near-flat roof-line throughout the town.
Most cities develop with some sort of rough roof-line, as Shibam has. As the needs of density grow over time, however, taller buildings must break this roof-line and stand in isolation from the surrounding city, commanding views and creating landmarks. They push up above the existing urban fabric and announce their presence on the skyline, and they use verticality to do so. They also afford occupants greater access to light, air and views. Buildings such as these are the first examples of structures that can be considered skyscrapers.
The term skyscraper is one without a clear definition, and there has been much discussion over which building should be given the title of the first skyscraper. It’s an interesting debate, but nearly all arguments boil down to a question of semantics. What’s important for us here is that the pressures of density force multi-story buildings to grow in height, and somewhere along the way the skyscraper was born. This growth in height was made possible by two developments. First, the passenger lift removed the need to climb stairs to reach higher floors. Up until this point, buildings were generally limited to four or five stories because it was difficult to rent out spaces higher than that. Prospective tenants didn’t want to climb so many flights of stairs to reach their office or home.[1] The second development was steel frame construction. This removed the reliance on load-bearing masonry walls, which often grew very thick at their base in order to support the load from above. With these two developments, buildings were able to grow much taller than their neighbors.
1904 drawing of Queen Anne’s Mansions by Joseph Pennell. The building towered over its surroundings, affording views to its occupants but drawing controversy from the public.
Many early examples of buildings that towered over their surroundings caused controversy, and many led to legislation limiting the height of buildings in their towns and cities. One early example was Queen Anne’s Mansions, built in 1873 in London. The building originally stood twelve stories tall (a later addition brought the total up to fourteen). Upon completion, it was the tallest residential building in Britain, and the sheer bulk of the building and its banal exterior caused a public outcry. This outcry ultimately led to legislation restricting building heights in London in 1890, and again in 1894.[2] Aside from it's height, Queen Anne’s Mansions was also distinctive for being the first building in London to use passenger lifts, and it was quite popular as a result.[3] A similar example is the Cairo Hotel, built in 1894 in Washington DC. The building was believed to be too big for its context, and led to the Heights of Buildings Act of 1899, which limited the height of buildings in the city, much like the London example.[4] In most places these controversies would be short lived, as our need for verticality would quickly take over the skyline and push us further away from the surface.
Most early skyscrapers were boxy buildings that maximized their floor area by building out to their lot lines. Developers were gaining an appetite for building taller, and each wanted to out-build their competitors by building the tallest structure. This was a battle of Ego, since the building owners were using verticality to distinguish themselves from the competition. Early examples of this are the New York Tribune Building, built in 1875 in New York City, the Home Insurance Building, built in 1885 in Chicago, and the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building, built in 1890, also in Chicago. Each of these buildings are notable for various reasons, but the true turning point in our quest for verticality came with the construction of the Equitable Building, built from 1913 to 1915 in the Financial District of New York City.
Postcard of the Equitable Building, circa 1922. The tower rose straight up from its lot line without setbacks, and ushered in the age of the skyscraper.
The Equitable Building was a massive forty-story skyscraper that rose straight up from its lot lines for its entire height without setbacks. It was so bulky that it led to the New York City Zoning Laws of 1916, which required buildings to set back from the street as they rose, in order to allow light and air to reach the surface. The building and the resulting laws opened the door to much taller buildings, and a race to conquer the skies. We were now able to escape the surface within our structures. We had fully shed our attention to God and replaced it with our own Ego.
Next, we’ll explore the age of the skyscraper. These buildings would come to dominate nearly every city skyline in the Western world, and they would define many of our struggles with verticality moving forward. Skyscrapers also allowed humanity to look down on the surface from great heights, resulting in an abstraction from it due to the isolation that great heights bring.
Keep reading: Verticality, Part X: Conquering the Skies
[1]: “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.” In Aesop's Fables, 24–26. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867.
[2]: Weisman, Winston. "New York and the Problem of the First Skyscraper." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XII, no. 1 (March 1953): 15.
[3]: Dennis, Richard. "'Babylonian Flats' in Victorian and Edwardian London." The London Journal 33, no. 3 (November 2008): 238.
[4]: Dennis, 243.
[5]: Lathrop, Wendy. "Vantage Point: The Curse of (Certain) Tall Buildings." The American Surveyor, January 2009, 59.