BiblioVault - Books about Skyscraper

Chicago 1890

The Skyscraper and the Modern City

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Chicago’s first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city’s modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city’s toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country.

An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago’s defining events—including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Burnham’s Plan of Chicago—by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city’s cultural and political crosscurrents.

While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism’s inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period’s popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury’s chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper’s vaunted status was never as inevitable as today’s skylines suggest.

[more]

The Skyscraper and the City

The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York

Gail Fenske

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York.
Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them.
As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

[more]

Souls Of Skyscraper

Lisa Fine

Temple University Press, 1990

"Fine's book adds to the debate over why the gender composition of the clerical labor force changed so quickly and completely." --American Studies During the late nineteenth century, a visitor to the city of Chicago would have looked in wonder at the many strange, new, and exciting sights: the nation's first skyscrapers, the bustling and congested streets, the large department stores, and the business girls. The Souls of the Skyscraper documents and explains the transformation of clerical work from a male to a female occupation amidst the industrialization and urbanization of the United States. Using literary, organizational, statistical, cinematic, and archival evidence primarily from Chicago, Lisa M. Fine explains the historical reasons why clerical work became women's work. The appearance of the female clerical worker in the business office signaled two on-going developments: the simple shift of women entering and dominating office jobs that were previously held by men, and the changing gender definition of clerical work. This new opportunity for employment provided women with relatively well-paying and respectable jobs, even though the prestige of the clerical positions was devalued as more women were hired. While economic forces contributed to this process of occupational change, the vocational education of women, the availability of various types of social services such as group homes (e.g. the Eleanor Residences), and the evolving image of the working girl in the popular culture encouraged women to seek clerical positions. Fine explores the realms where the gender definition of clerical work was discussed and negotiated: among technical experts, in the popular culture, in the prescriptions and actions of civic leaders, and in the private worlds of clerical workers themselves. In revealing the dynamics of change within the clerical sector, she enhances our understanding of occupational sex-typing.

[more]