SOURCE: "Aesthetics of the Skyscraper: The Views of Sullivan, James and Wright," in American Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 3, Fall, 1957, pp. 316-24.

[In the following essay, Buitenhuis discusses the twentieth-century urban skyscraper in an examination of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and the fiction of Henry James.]

When a new form is invented, whether it be in art, literature or architecture, a new aesthetic has to be created so that the form, in its various manifestations, can be evaluated and criticized. Some of the worst and most misguided criticism is always written during the infancy of a new form, but also some of the most original and incisive. The views of Louis Sullivan, Henry James and Frank Lloyd Wright on the typically American innovation of the skyscraper are not only constructive but also show how far men of different generations, backgrounds and temperaments can agree on aesthetic judgments.

Before the evolution of the steel skeleton frame, the weight and relatively low tensile strength of masonry limited the height of the office building to about twelve floors. The demand for taller buildings became stronger and stronger, however, as American cities rapidly grew in the closing years of the nineteenth century and commercial land values soared. The steel frame was a direct response to this demand. The first office building to utilize the technique was constructed in 1885. It soon became obvious that a steel-framed building could rise at least four times as high as a masonry building. In little over ten years the technique had revolutionized tall office-building design.

The center of development of this new architectural form was Chicago. It was a place peculiarly well-suited to the idea of the skyscraper. The bustling, booming city, with a tremendous sense of its destiny as the future metropolis of the Midwest, was the city in America most individualistic in its enterprise. In the tall building the American tycoon found a fitting symbol for his restless drive and buoyant hopes. In the 1880's and 1890's large numbers of skyscrapers were built in Chicago. The impetus rapidly spread to other cities, especially New York. Many of the architects called upon to design skyscrapers worked within established forms, merely elongating these forms to fit the needs of the tall building. The wealth of their clients stimulated them also to decorate their designs with lavish copies of classical and Gothic models. Some Chicago architects were, however, dissatisfied with this approach to a new form. One of the most visionary of these was Louis Sullivan.

Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked in Sullivan's office between 1887 and 1894, recounts how one day Sullivan entered his cubicle, placed a piece of manila paper on Wright's desk, and left without a word. On the paper was an elevation of the Wainwright Building, "the very first human expression," Wright called it, "of a tall steel officebuilding as Architecture."¹ Wright pointed out that Sullivan had hit upon the fundamental principle of skyscraper design in his replacement of the broken, opaque walls of previous tall buildings with sheer, transparent screens. The only part of the building that Wright disliked was the elaborate cornice. In such designs as that for the Reliance Building (1895), Sullivan corrected this tendency toward ornamentation and produced soaring, well-proportioned, curtain-walled skyscrapers.²

Sullivan himself first raised the aesthetic problem of the skyscraper in an article that appeared in March, 1896, called "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered."

How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions? How shall we proclaim from the dizzy heights of this strange, weird, modern housetop the peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of a higher life?³

The answer to this question lay in his own famous apothegm: "form follows function."

The function of the office-building, as Sullivan saw it, was to supply a large number of identical, well-lit offices. He therefore proposed a modular unit on which the design of the skyscraper should be based.

The practical horizontal and vertical division or office unit is naturally based on a room of comfortable area and height, and the size of this standard office room as naturally predetermines the standard structural unit, and, approximately, the size of window openings. In turn, these purely arbitrary units of structure form in an equally natural way the true basis of the artistic development of the exterior.⁴

The building was to be, simply, a tier of identical floors, except for a main entrance floor and an attic for tanks, pipes and machinery. Sullivan denied the need for cornice or frieze or any other embellishment of the building. He pointed out that although nine out of ten skyscrapers then being built were used as a display for "architectural knowledge in the encyclopaedic sense," it was obvious that such decoration was mere folly. The architect was in this way only speaking "a foreign language with a noticeable American accent," instead of expressing with "native instinct and sensibility" that which was in him to say in "the simplest, most modest, most natural way. .. . "⁵

In a style that savors of Walt Whitman, Sullivan justified the form of the skyscraper.

What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in his expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line—that it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of most bald, most sinister, most forbidding conditions.⁶

From the start, Sullivan was well aware of these "forbidding conditions" in which skyscrapers were built. He saw that they were a response to a selfish commercial need, and a direct result of the rapidly rising value of city lots in good business locations. In his skyscrapers he sought to transmute these drives into a soaring form which signified the endeavor but made no concessions to the "lower passions" which provided the original impetus for the form. The steel frame was boldly outlined on the exterior of the building. It provided both the frame for the huge windows and the unit of construction. In the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1899) and the McClurg Building (1900), the form is seen at its best. The soaring vertical piers of steel are regularly and cleanly intersected by the horizontal girders which mark the level of floors and ceilings.⁷

While the Chicago skyline soon revealed the results of the work of Sullivan and like-minded architects, that of New York showed no such change. Although New York architects lost no time in adopting the steel frame principle, they retained the thick masonry construction of the old tall buildings on the exterior, to give the illusion that the stone was securely bearing the weight. There was no grace in the heavy vertical stone pillars nor in the horizontal bands of masonry and cast iron of these new skyscrapers. They struggled up into the sky encumbered by layers of brick, stone, iron and marble. For them, "rising in sheer exultation" was out of the question.

These were the skyscrapers that Henry James saw when he sailed into the harbor in 1904, after an absence of more than twenty years, and looked across at what he called in The American Scene the "serried, bristling city" of New York. Nearly thirty years earlier, in 1878, James had written a story, An International Episode, in which an English nobleman, visiting New York, is to his surprise shot up in an elevator to the seventh floor of a "fresh, light, ornamental structure, ten stories high." He looks out of the window of the office in which he finds himself to see the weather vane of a church steeple on a line with his eyes.⁸ It is probable that this is a fictional account of a visit that James himself paid to an office on Wall Street. The weather vane surely belonged to the spire of Trinity Church. He returned to the scene on his visit of 1904-5 and gazed in astonishment at "the special sky-scraper that overhangs poor old Trinity to the north—a south face as high and wide as the mountain-wall that drops the alpine avalanche, from time to time, upon the village, and the village spire, at its foot. . . . "⁹ The difference between the "ornamental structure, ten stories high" and this "mountain-wall" must have been a measure to James of the difference made by the intervening years to his "old" New York.

James found many reasons to dislike these new skyscrapers. To him the "flash of innumerable windows and flicker of subordinate gilt attributions" seemed like "the flare, up and down their long, narrow faces, of the lamps of some general permanent 'celebration.'"¹⁰ The windows of most New York skyscrapers at this time were set deeply into the thick masonry, as if the buildings had been thought of as substantial houses extended almost indefinitely upwards. As a result, the skyline was dense with the flashing, broken facades that James found so distasteful.

It was natural that he should seek to compare the skyscraper with some analogous structure in European architecture, deeply versed as he was in this aspect of the older civilization. He found his analogy in the Renaissance bell-towers of Italy. Yet how different they were from these "towers of glass"! "Such a structure," he wrote, "as the comparatively windowless bell-tower of Giotto, in Florence, looks supremely serene in its beauty. You don't feel it to have risen by the breath of an interested [money] passion that, restless beyond all passions, is for ever seeking more pliable forms." In the Giotto tower James found a successful solution to the eternal quest for form. "Beauty," he continued, "has been the object of its creator's idea, and, having found beauty, it has found the form in which it splendidly rests."¹¹ We have seen that Sullivan started his quest from another quarter—a quarter typically American in its pragmatism. Function had been his first objective; form was to follow it, and beauty was to be the result. Paradoxically, Sullivan's finest curtainwalled skyscrapers have in them much of the sheer elegance of the Italian windowless towers.

Implicit in Sullivan's justification for the form of the skyscraper is the premise that the building should stand in isolation. A lofty building has little "force and power of altitude" if it is crowded by other tall buildings. The New York skyscrapers seemed to James to be "extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow . . ."¹² Land values had soared so rapidly in Manhattan at the end of the nineteenth century that landowners had competed among themselves to put up tall buildings. Already, in 1904, they huddled together and hemmed in the streets. "Quiet interspaces." James wrote, "always half the architectural battle, exist no more in such a structural scheme."¹³ However, on a few occasions, Henry James saw skyscrapers as Louis Sullivan intended them to be seen, when tricks of light softened their broken outlines. In the later afternoons of some summer and winter days, a "refinement of modelling," James observed, "descends from the skies and lends the white towers, all new and crude and commercial and over-windowed as they are, a fleeting distinction."¹⁴ Even when, one foggy morning, he had been gazing up at the skyscraper that had "extinguished" Trinity, he had been aware that "the vast money-making structure quite horribly, quite romantically justified itself, looming through the weather with an insolent cliff-like sublimity."¹⁵

James's most radical criticism of the New York skyscrapers was that the commercial motive which had caused them to be built, the motive which Sullivan had successfully sublimated, dominated the form. "They, " James ironically and balefully observed, "ranged in this terrible recent erection, were going to bring in money—and was not money the only thing a self-respecting structure could be thought of as bringing in?"¹⁶ Convinced as he was that the mercenary spirit was, of all, the most restless, he saw little chance that the form should remain as it was.

Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any¹⁸ cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the most expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. This shall be possibly a word of still uglier meaning, but the vocabulary of thrift at any price shows boundless resources, and the consciousness of that truth, the consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state, twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market.¹⁷

Even the windows themselves seemed to James to have a sinister purpose. "Doesn't it," he asked, "take in fact acres of window-glass to help even an expert New Yorker to get the better of another expert one, or to see that the other expert one doesn't get the better of him?" The answer was apparently self-evident. "It is easy to conceive," he went on, "that, after all, with this origin and nature stamped upon their foreheads, the last word of the mercenary monsters should not be their address to our sense of formal beauty."¹⁸

Frank Lloyd Wright's observations on the New York skyscrapers, written twenty-five years later, are remarkably similar in ideas, if not in language, to those of Henry James. As a basis for his criticism, however, were the principles of skyscraper construction that he had learned from Sullivan. Looking back in 1930 to those visionary designs by his old master, he could see how little they had affected the designs of the contemporary skyscrapers. In his lecture "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper," given at Princeton, he said: "The light that shone in the Wainwright Building as a promise, flickered feebly and is fading away."¹⁹

By this time, skyscrapers had clustered so thickly that the city had been forced to pass some "set-back" laws, so that some light should filter down into the street canyons and into the lower offices. Set-back skyscrapers lose of course that single soaring line that Sullivan postulated as the basis for design. Wright pointed out:

The Skyscraper of today is only the prostitute semblance of the architecture it professes to be. The heavy brick and stone that falsely represents walls is, by the very set-back laws, unnaturally forced onto the interior steel stilts to be carried down by them through twenty, fifty or more stories to the ground. The picture is improved, but the picturesque element in it all is false work built over a hollow box. These new tops are shams, too—box-balloons.²⁰

James had used the same image as Wright, characteristically muted, to call all the gilding on the skyscrapers the efforts of a "compromised charmer" to cover up the temporary nature and insincerity of the building.²¹ Also in the same vein as James, Wright observed: "The skyscraper envelope is not ethical, beautiful or permanent. It is a commercial exploit or a mere expedient. It has no higher ideal of unity than commercial success." Wright also recognized that the congestion of the skyscrapers had robbed them of what distinction they might have gained from their height. "Utterly barbaric," he wrote, "they rise regardless of special consideration for environment or for each other, except to win the race or get the tenant. Space as a becoming psychic element of the American city is gone."²² As Sullivan had before him, Wright scorned those native architects who had tried to bring Beaux-Arts ideas to bear on the design of the skyscraper and to see it as a column, with base, shaft and capital. He derided those architects who saw it as "Gothic—commercial competitor to the Cathedral."²³ He demanded integrity and sanity in the design and erection of skyscrapers in American cities.

Sullivan had treated the skyscraper as a form without taking into consideration the rest of the city scene. Both Wright and James, however, realized that it was impossible to deal with the skyscraper apart from the aesthetic and utilitarian aspects of the whole city. Both saw in what James called "the original sin of longitudinal avenues perpetually, yet meanly intersected" and Wright "the original village grid-iron" the root of New York's trouble. James wrote darkly:

There is violence outside, mitigating sadly the frontal majesty of the monument, leaving it exposed to the vulgar assault of the street by the operation of those dire facts of absence of margin, of meagreness of site, of the brevity, of the block, of the inveteracy of the near thoroughfare, which leave 'style,' in construction, at the mercy of the impertinent cross-streets, make a detachment and independence, save in the rarest cases, an insoluble problem, preclude without pity any element of court or garden, and open to the builder in quest of distinction the one alternative, and the great adventure, of seeking his reward in the sky.²⁴

Wright observed:

Barely tolerable for a village, the grid becomes a dangerous criss-cross check to all forward movements even in a large town where horses are motive power. But with the automobile and skyscraper that opposes and kills the automobile's contribution to the city, stop-and-go attempts to get across to somewhere or to anywhere, for that matter, in the great Metropolis, are inevitable waste—dangerous and maddening to a degree where sacrificial loss, in every sense but one, is for everyone.

Erstwhile village streets become grinding pits of metropolitan misery. Frustration of all life, in the village-that-became-a-city, is imminent in this, the great unforeseen Metropolis. . . . "²⁵

Unlike James, however, Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the skyscraper as form had great possibilities. He was strongly of the opinion that the commercial motive behind the building of skyscrapers was a force for good. "Business ethics," he wrote, "make a good platform for true Aesthetics in this Machine Age or in any other." In Wright's eyes, the trouble was that the dominating force in the construction of the New York skyscrapers was not business ethics alone but "a conscious yearn, a generosity, a prodigality in the name of taste and refinement" that led only to pretension and artificiality. Were this mummery only dropped, Wright believed (as had Sullivan) that "space-manufacturing-for-rent," as he called it, "might become genuine architecture and be beautiful as standardization in steel, metals and glass."²⁶ Perhaps to prove this point, Wright built his superb skyscraper for the Johnson Wax Company at Racine, Wisconsin. The building is suspended from a central core of steel and concrete, and the sheer glass walls, accented with vertical metal strips, are banded by the parapets of the alternate floors which are cantilevered out from the core. The intermediate floors, which are circular, do not reach the exterior walls, so that the horizontal planes are not overemphasized. Equally important, this skyscraper stands apart from other tall buildings, so that its "force and power of altitude" can be seen and appreciated.²⁷

To bring order out of the chaos of New York, Wright recommended that immediate action be taken to control the erection of further skyscrapers. He also urged the broadening of roadbeds and the removal of pedestrians to a higher level. James made no such specific recommendation. He only reflected wryly on the endless abuse of natural beauty and constant scorn of opportunity in New York. As he looked at the tall buildings that marched relentlessly northwards up Manhattan and along the Hudson, he came to what was for him, a life-long conservative and individualist, a remarkable conclusion.

The whole thing is the vividest of lectures on the subject of individualism, and on the strange truth, no doubt, that this principle may in the field of art—at least if the art be architecture—often conjure away just that mystery of distinction which it sometimes so markedly promotes in the field of life. . . . And yet why should the charm ever fall out of the 'personal,' which is so often the very condition of the exquisite? Why should conformity and subordination, that acceptance of control and assent to collectivism in the name of which our age has seen such dreary things done, become on a given occasion the one not vulgar way of meeting a problem?²⁸

Henry James expressed in this question the whole dilemma of the city-planner. The irony of the situation is that the skyscraper, symbol of American individual enterprise, should be that form of construction most necessary to control in order to bring back not only some measure of convenience to the American city, but also to restore to it the aesthetic appeal of its own loftiness.

In the views of Sullivan, James and Wright, we can see then a spectrum of architectural criticism. Firstly, there is the definition and the justification of the form, secondly the criticism of the misuses of the form, and lastly an attempt to relate the special problems that the skyscraper raises to the planning of the city. Although James was, basically, opposed to the idea of the skyscraper, he yet gave it the benefit of the consideration due any significant new form, as few had done before him. In criticizing the form, however, he sought always to find in it the expression of the "money-passion" which he came to believe was corrupting so much of twentieth-century American life. Sullivan and Wright were both aware of this commercial motive in the form, but they turned their critical and creative talents to separating what they considered to be the gold of American enterprise and endeavor from the dross of prodigality, ostentation and historicism. All three recognized in the skyscraper a peculiarly American form and strove to evaluate it in terms of their vision of American life.

¹ Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper/' Modern Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), p. 85.

² William Alex, "The Skyscraper: USA," Perspectives 8, Summer 1954, Plate 10.

³ Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Kindergarten Chats (rev. ed.), ed., Isabella Athey (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), p. 202.

⁴ Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, p. 203.

⁵Ibid., pp. 208, 213.

⁶Ibid, p. 206.

⁷ Alex, "The Skyscraper: USA," plates 12 & 13.

⁸ Henry James, "An International Episode," The Great Short Novels of Henry James, ed. Philip Rahv (New York: Dial Press, 1944), p. 157.

⁹ Henry James, The American Scene (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907), p. 83.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 76.

¹¹ James, The American Scene, pp. 77-78.

¹²Ibid., p. 76.

¹³Ibid., p. 95.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 81.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 83.

¹⁶ James, The American Scene, p. 94.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 77.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 96.

¹⁹ Wright, Modern Architecture, p. 98.

²⁰ Wright, Modern Architecture, pp. 94-95.

²¹ James, The American Scene, pp. 110-11.

²² Wright, Modern Architecture, p. 98.

²³Ibid., p. 94.

²⁴ James, The American Scene, p. 100.

²⁵ Wright, Modern Architecture, pp. 90-91.

²⁶Ibid., p. 96.

²⁷ Alex, "The Skyscraper: USA," plates 31-33.

²⁸ James, The American Scene, pp. 141-42.