TOWERED CITIES.
THE " skyscrapers " of New York have already begun te outlive a good deal of their disrepute, and indeed to command the credit that belongs to all strong and original building. Many of the lankest of these buildings are beyond a doubt basely and irretrievably utilitarian; but from the beginning there were architects who perceived that "sky- scrapers" were inevitable, and who set to work to design the most scientific, and architecturally the most noble, buildings which the circumstances permitted. This, after all, is the true and common, if not the final, function of architecture,— to produce the most scholarly design which is appropriate to the uses the building will be put to, and which abides by the limitations of site and cost imposed by the architect's employers. The limitations in New York have long been strict, and they daily become stricter. The city is built upon an island from which escape can only be made by bridges, tunnels, and steamers. The pressure at the business end of the city, which is at the point of the island, and therefore on the edge of the water, is intense, and the value of building-land is fabulous. Geographical and financial reasons both prevent the business-houses from expanding horizontally, and therefore they must extend vertically,— towards the sky. When the necessity for this is recog- nised universally—and we should think it almost is by this time—a new era is certain to come in which taste will undergo a considerable revolution. The " skyscraper " will be more and more praised as a characteristic product of the American genius, and it will be judged in practice, not by the mere fact that it is a "skyscraper," but by the kind of " skyscraper" it is. An illustrated article which is published in the November number of Putnam's Monthly gives a very good idea of the variations of theme which can be imposed upon the invariable factor of height. "The City of Dreadful Height," if it appears in future as a great multiple of the buildings illustrated in Mr. J. B. Gilder's article, will positively have, as we cannot hesitate to say, a very distinct majesty of its own.
The great Singer building in New York—nicknamed the Singerhorn—was finished not long ago. It has forty-five stories. This is a notable increase of height on the Park Row Syndicate building, which a few years since astounded the world with its twenty-six stories. Londoners may try to measure the Singerhorn by thinking of Queen Anne's Mansions, our nearest approach to a "skyscraper," which have at the highest part only fourteen stories. The cupola of the Singerhorn is six hundred feet above Broadway. But forty-five stories are by no means the limit. While the Singerhorn was being built the Metropolitan Life Assurance Company glorified its original plans for a new building, and announced that it would build fifty stories, and that its tower would be nearly a hundred feet higher than the Singerhorn. The Metropolitan is already in existence, and still the competi- tion continues. The Equitable Life Assurance Society, not content with fifty stories, promises a building of sixty-two, —half as high again as the Singerhorn. Where is the sky- ward race to end ? Mr. Gilder says :—" I, for one, should not be amazed were the next few years to bring into being an office-building of nearly a hundred stories, rising twelve hundred feet from base to cupola. Already there is report of a thousand-foot building, to occupy in part the site of the Mills building in Broad Street; and the Scientific American has pointed out that the present local Building Code, by permitting a pressure of fifteen tons per square foot under the footings on a rock bottom, where caisson foundations are used, implicitly authorises the construction of a two-thousand- foot building of the Singer type, capable of subdivision into a hundred and fifty stories, each thirteen feet four inches high." But that, as Mr. Gilder says, may be dismissed as a reductio ad absurdum. It might be thought that the tallest "sky- scrapers " already existing are not safe, but .no building of this kind is exactly what it appears to be. It is a great steel cage simply clothed with stone, brick, or marble ; it is not . so .heavy, or so. top-heavy,, as ene rpielt suppose ;
and the foundations go proportionately deep below the titirfate. The invisible part is not nearly so large as the submerged part of an iceberg, but it is still an essential and most important part of the tonstruotion. It is only twenty years ago that the first offices were reared upon the scientific foundation which has made all the subsequent " skyscrapers" possible. And in theie twenty years the skyline of New York has been transformed out of all recognition. It is as though an Alpine range had been thrust upwards by some slow
volcanic pressure. Mr. Gilder' says As to the impressive- ness of the present skyline as seen from the East River, the Hudson or the Bay, there can be no question. Nothing of
its kind exists elsewhere The immense masses of tnasomy, hundreds of feet high, above which ascend towers and turrets conspicuously higher, produce an effect grandiose in the extreme. At night, one seems to be approaching a city set upon a bill, the innumerable lights producing, here and there, the effect of winding roads leading upward from the level waterside; And visible for many a mile, above all other objects, the shaft of the Singer building, illuminated within and without by Countless lights, glows like a lily in the pool Of night."
Recently wewrote of the Venetian effect of this lofty city as the traveller approaches it from the sea. It is perhaps the nearest modern counterpart of what ancient Tyre was with its tall buildings,—tall for the very reason that the New York buildings are tall. But we said nothing of the breaks and decorations of the tops of the houses as they are seen against the sky. It is obvious that the regulated architecture of the future will concern itself much with this variegated line, for if the buildings were allowed to rise to a uniform level, sun- shine and fresh air would be shut out for ever. As a consumer of light and air the " skyscraper" is already enough of a vampire: Madison Square is almost without sunshine in the winter. Within the last few weeks a Committee has been appointed in New York to revise the Building Code, and it is expected that a limit to height will be recommended. Mr. 'Flagg, the architect of the Singerhorn, has a definite proposal to make, apparently with the approval of most of his brother- architects. This is that no " façade shall rise more than one hundred feet above the street; and that only one quarter of the lot on which a building stands shall be covered by any part of the building which rises to a greater height than this : and that such higher part shall come no nearer the front line of the building than that line comes to the curb." To the height of the tower itself lie would fix no bounds. The meaning is clear. The dead skyline of the future city will not rise extravagantly high, but above it, like particular peaks upon •a chain of mountains, will be towers and domes and pinnacles, through which the sun may shine 'and the breezes blow. New York will be a towered city. And then of course this style of architecture will be imitated all over the world. It is really the legitimate product of 'peculiar conditions, and it will be illegitimate wherever those 'conditions do not exist. But that will not be thought to matter. Have not unsuitable styles of architecture always been transplanted ? Do not people who live in hilly countries gravely set up obelisks in their valleys, though obelisks were 'designed originally to be signs and memorials in flat deserts P But to New Mirk, at all events, will belong the fame of originality among all the towered cities of the world. The towers of New York will be reckoned as characteristic as the minarets of a Mohammedan city, as the bell-towers of Russia, ' se the pillar-towers of India, as the peels of Scottish fortresses, as the pagodas of China, or as the campaniles of Italy.
This is a:very attractive prospect in its' way, but the dis- advantages give one pause. At an exhibition in New York lately the models and diagrams demonstrating the conditions ' of the congested population were quite a "sensation." When hnmanity is strung upwards towards the clouds in increasing ' numbers is it likely that these conditions can be easily improved P We need not spend sympathy on those who will live at the top like rooks in lofty elms. Their offices and habitations will sway a few feet this way and that in gales, and they will be told, like visitors to the Eiffel Tower, that this
• elasticity in a steel structure is the proof 'of stability. These people, too, will breathe a free and fresh air. But those who live in the dense and contaminated strata below will sacrifice much' to convenience. Will every member of this population in layer's have the necessary amount of cubic air-space ? Express and slow elevators are already familiar in New York. The system of "non-stop" journeys will have to be extended. No one, we should think, would go up to the sixtieth floor in a slow elevator. But some day may there not be yet a further architectural development P We wonder whether a man who lives on, say, the fortieth floor will always have to descend to the street to call upon a neighbour who lives on the fortieth floor opposite ? The height of the houses will itself be the length of a respectable street. It is not beyond the bounds of imagination that light bridges will be thrown across from building to building, say, at the middle and high levels. The towns would then be interlaced like the masts of a ship with rigging. There would be unlimited possibilities for graceful lines and pleasing adornment in the American architecture of that distant day.
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