CHRYSLER BUILDING

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CHRYSLER BUILDING
William Van Alen- architect
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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The Chrysler Building is certainly unique and in
  1930, it reflected a merger of the new and the
  old. The shiny Nirosta steel that clad the
  sunburst tower and gleaming Gargoyles had never
  been used in America before. These were not
  gothic gargoyles but the icons of the Chrysler
  automobile, one of the many wonders of this
  machine age.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING
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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The internal structures of the Chrysler Building
  also reflected the advanced mechanics of the
  modern age. Alongside these innovations were
  staid light brick cladding, and the tower form,
  both conventional by 1930.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• Along with this juxtaposition in design was a
  juxtaposition in meaning. Even though the
  Chrysler Building had to give up its title of
  tallest in the world to the Empire State Building
  only a few months later, the silver tower
  remained a powerful icon, standing at a
  crossroads of ideologies in the 1930's. Some saw
  the Chrysler Building as wholly new, the symbol
  of the beauty and bounty that would come to be
  called the modern age. At the same time, others
  tried to place the building in the context of
  past decades and centuries.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• With one eye, America was looking forward to the
  new and exciting prospects that the innovations
  in technology provided. With the other eye,
  America looked backward, trying to find a useable
  past, a continuum in which the Chrysler Building
  was just another inevitable event.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• By architectural standards of the 1930's, the
  building was only half modern at best. It did
  have the unusual top, and the gargoyles covered
  in a new kind of steel--planished, enduro, or
  nirosta--depending on which article you read, but
  the cladding was still brick, and the tower form
  was conventional. It did not approach the high
  Modern style of the Philadelphia Savings Fund
  Society (1932).

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• However, it was very modern in its decor, its
  construction, its operation and most of all in
  its spirit--something that Walter Chrysler had
  consciously created.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING
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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The decor of the Chrysler Building was a decided
  break from the gothic and classical spires that
  had come before. It still had gargoyles, but
  these were not the ornate stone sculptures from
  the Woolworth building, but gleaming symbols of
  the automobile industry. The corners of the 61st
  floors were graced with eagles, replicas of the
  1929 Chrysler hood ornaments. On the 31st floors
  were giant radiator caps.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The mural on the ceiling of the lobby embodied
  the idea of "Energy and man's application of it."
  The style of the mural and the ornate lobby were
  decidedly Art Deco, a new motif promoted at the
  1925 Arts Exposition Internationale Arts
  Decoratifs et Industrials Modernes in Paris.
  Characteristic of the designs are very stylized
  low-relief sculpture and the use of tiles.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• "A thoroughly modern structure in every practical
  detail, the Chrysler building is also one of the
  outstanding examples of the application of modern
  art tendencies to the skyscraper. Its sponsor has
  expressed the same imagination and the same
  foresight in anticipating critical public demand
  that have given the name Chrysler international
  prestige as the symbol of new thinking and new
  daring in going beyond the less imaginative"
  (Chrysler promotional booklet).

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The completed Chrysler Building reflected a "full
  recognition of the arrival of the electrical era"
  (McHugh 268). It housed 32 elevators that were
  described in Scientific American "Otis electric
  gearless, machine type, with full automatic
  signal control and automatic leveling. This type
  is practically self operating" (268). They could
  go up to speeds of 1200 feet a minute, but were
  curbed to 700 feet per minute by the law of New
  York City (Murchison 78).

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• The heating system was a new design that was
  divided into zones so one portion of the building
  could be heated without effecting the others.
• The structure's vast size and technological
  infrastructure led to new ways of thinking about
  the skyscraper.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• "The thing we have to get in our minds in
  thinking of a skyscraper is that it is not a
  building, but a city" (Walker 692). Chrysler
  liked this idea of his building as a self
  sufficient entity and promoted it in his
  brochure "Here is a city within a city--a
  community with its Schrafft's restaurant and its
  Terminal barber shop, its stores, and beauty
  parlor, its two gymnasiums and its two emergency
  hospitals for men and for women...

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• Every contribution to efficiency, sanitation,
  comfort and even inspiration, that human
  ingenuity can conceive or money can buy is
  provided". According to Chrysler, size and
  technology had met to create the community of the
  future.
• The ability to control the environment of this
  "new city" captured the imagination.

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CHRYSLER BUILDING

• Climate control could only be a beginning to
  bigger and better and often more outlandish
  ideas "Architects are beginning to discuss ideas
  of using modified pneumatic tubes to replace
  elevators and to shoot persons into skyscrapers"
  (Bareuther 586).

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CHRYSLER BUILDING
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Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS Building)
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Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS Building)

• The PSFS Building has been hailed as the first
  truly modern skyscraper. It was not clad with the
  heavy stone of its skyscraper ancestors, but had
  membrane-like walls of glass and metal. The
  windows were set in ribbon-like horizontal
  strips, not square boxes punched in the side of
  brick cladding. The form of the building showed a
  clear distinction of parts, and the tower
  utilized the powers of steel frame construction
  to cantilever the tower out over the base.

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Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS Building)

• There would not be another skyscraper that
  followed the tenets of Modern architecture so
  closely until after World War II.

George Howe William LescazePhiladelphia, 1932