notes & extracts from reading ‘form follows finance’

notes & extracts from reading ‘form follows finance’, Carol Willis

My misc thoughts are in square brackets []

• how skyscrapers and skylines took shape through the first half of the 20thC?
• factors: primary importance: economic & programmatic formulas for quality office space (tends to standardize high rise design), secondary: local conditions: historic grid of blocks & lots, municipal codes, zoning (caused tall buildings to develop distinct forms, & a vernacular distinct to each city), thirdly: effects of human actions and decisions, and of imposed patterns and policies.
• viewing high-rise design typologically – identifying different characteristic forms in two cities (New York & Chicago), interpreting them as a product of standard market formulas and specific urban conditions.
• skyscraper history – two major periods: 1: late 19thC → great depression, the precursor, ‘proto-modernism’ of the Chicago school, and the Art Deco of the 1920s. 2: post Depression & WW2: intro of new building materials & engineering technologies, hegemonic influence of high modernism.
• International Style – not just stylistic use, but using the term to suggest the relationship – or lack thereof – between the form of a building and its site and surroundings. International refers to the fact that advances in technology as well as changes in architectural ideology made tall buildings independent of their sites and essentially interchangeable from one city to another.

Some early views on high-rises:

[EXALTATION?]: Sullivan

• “lofty” – it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation from bottom to top…without a single dissenting line… it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of the most bald, most sinister, most forbidding conditions.
• Sullivan scorned the social and economic forces that fostered the modern office building. Disdain for the skyscraper was common among architects at the time, who believed that the commercial nature of the tall office building was incompatible with the art of architecture.

[THRIFT?]: George Hill (an expert on commercial real estate, and Architectural Record contributor):

• irked by emphasis on the art of the skyscraper.
• Insistence on the linkage between profit and program as fundamental to commercial architecture, where the function of a building is to produce rents, and economic considerations govern design decisions. [Yuck… :S]
• …the only measure of success of an office building is the average net return from rentals for a period of, say 15 years. Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste – is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money. [depending on that someone, not necessarily a bad idea…]

[MIDDLE GROUND?]: Barr Feree, editor of Engineering Magazine:

• Current American architecture is not a matter of art, but of business. A building must pay or there will be no investor ready with the money to meet its cost. This is once the curse and the glory of American architecture.
• designers working intelligently within a formula with its own beautiful economy.
• Commercial nature of the skyscraper is a defining force, but need not be an impediment to beauty.
  

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In a city where lots are generally small and height is not regulated: Towers were the most profitable (e.g. in Manhattan)

If heights are capped and lots were generally large (e.g. Chicago), the dominate type was a rectangular box penetrated at the center or rear by a large light court [slab type?].

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Subchapter: Real Estate Rules for Skyscraper Design:

• Natural Light (prior to fluro bulbs intro in 1940), Quality and rentability of office space, “economic depth” – shallow, better lit space produced higher revenues than deep and dark interiors. High ceilings to let daylight penetrate as deeply as possible.
• It is better to have less space – less capital investment – permanently rented at a high figure, than to have too much space rented at a low figure.
• By the early 1900s, professionalization of building owners and managers led to interior layouts being quite standard – furniture used to define different work areas, partitions (open & glassed in)
• Power and rank (and, as a result, gender) reflected in spatial arrangement – executives in corner offices, or at least exterior windowed room, other staff regulated to deeper, darker spaces
• Corporate HQ as status, advertising
• Most profitable strategy for a building owner was to rent a large number of small offices, since such leases paid a higher rate per sq foot , rather than larger office units
• Chicago Developer Owen Aldis:
• * Good light & air, attractive lobbies & corridors, easy circulation, good building service & maintenance. Most important, he advocated creating only high quality spaces – “Second-class space costs as much to build as first-class space. Therefore build no second-class space.” – Aldis’s definition of “First-class” space was a maximum depth of 24feet from window to wall…
• * Façade – as part of owners marketing strategy – a façade has monetary value in these [commercial] buildings which is not always the case in other buildings.
• * Real Estate rules on massing and height – site blocks and lots, municipal codes that regulate height, bulk, lot coverage.

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