Interesting reading. However, I think your units got mixed up somewhere. 1200 feet/sec is more appropriate to the speed of a bullet from a gun than any elevator that I would want to ride!
What a great example of the right design constraints driving projects forward successfully? Was all of this sourced from a book or is this all original research? I can't imagine the time it took to put all of this into a cohesive narrative!
Thanks! There's actually a fairly small number of really detailed sources that I mainly used. The overall history is mostly from John Taraunac's The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark. The information about the design is mostly from a series of articles that ran in Architectural Forum in 1930 and 1931, written by various members of the design team. For the construction, there was a construction notebook written at the time that has been published as a book, Building the Empire State, that has some additional material as a forward.
As somebody that knows nothing about construction but is extremely curious and interested in architecture, I think this newsletter is brilliant and super informative!!!!!!
The Great Depression probably helped. When Rockefeller Center was built, they were able to hardball the steel manufacturers who had little other work available. By 1930 the economy was on a down swing. It was only their connections that let the Empire State Building team get funding. The building is a great business address. Even now, I do a double take when someone is renting space in the ESB or the Chrysler Building. It is not a great office building since it has very limited floor space on each floor. That was one of the things that the World Trade Center did right.
When comparing the construction of the old World Trade Center and its two towers to the construction of the Empire State Building, consider that the former had 13.4M square feet of office space while the latter had less than one quarter of that, 2.9M square feet.
Very interesting essay, and it's a fascinating subject. I'd looked a bit at the delta in seeming efficiency between the older buildings like Empire State, and modern buildings like the Shard, reaching a tentative conclusion that there's distilled knowledge meaning the time of construction remains still somewhat similar, even though planning processes is often quite delayed - https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/distilled-knowledge-is-the-key-to
I think your comparison between the Shard and the Empire State misses the fact that the Empire State building is in the neighborhood of two times the size of the Shard. ESB has a net rentable square footage of ~2.1 million square feet, and a gross square footage of 2.8 million square feet. The Shard has a floor area of 1.36 million square feet. (Wikipedia says 4.2 million but I think that's incorrect, see here https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-shard-by-numbers-true-scale-of-britains-1133393 and here https://www.ajbuildingslibrary.co.uk/projects/display/id/6948) This is also one of the reasons why the WTC took so much longer to build, it's a much larger project - ~10 million rentable square feet.
The Empire State Building, and Central Park Zoo, plus almost everything else by Robert Moses highlights the biggest problem facing America--we can't get major projects done on time and on budget, and our conception on-time it should take has gone from 1-2 years to 10-20 years. We can't do minor projects either to the point of absurdity. To cite a personal example, my coop, which is located in a landmark district, but is not landmarked, has spend months unable to proceed with repairs, since we have been unable to get approval for the mortar color. People in New York wonder why sidewalk bridges remain in place forever--blame the building department and the evil dictators at landmarks more than landlords.
Our non-fiscal safety net has begun to take on most of the characteristics of molasses. Sure, with your kitchen filled to waist-high, you won't slip in your stocking feet and slam your head on the counter, but brewing your morning coffee takes 90 minutes.
We're well beyond the point of diminishing returns whereupon risk mitigation begins to block all activity, and it's not just OSHA. Zoning is effectively risk mitigation for urban planning. Community engagement is risk mitigation for politicians building shit. Environmental review, as well.
I wonder what fraction of US GDP is actually spent on risk avoidance when viewed through this paradigm. Actual insurance is 3% of economic activity; if we bolt on all the compliance costs spread across every sector, does that double? Triple?
And, to make matters worse, trying (and failing) to police all of this means we're not sufficiently rigorous in policing the most basic issues; extractive industries routinely under-build wells and well caps and suffer avoidable blow-outs, new-build homes in urban areas frequently undermine neighboring houses and cause partial collapses, manufacturers often flaunt water and air quality rules... the list goes on and on.
In contrast, Time Warner Center took from 2000, when the old Coliseum was demolished, to 2004 to open. It topped out in 2003. The World Trade Center coming down in 2001 almost certainly slowed things down as it necessitated a safety review and stopped a lot of construction projects for at least a year. In contrast to the Empire State Building TWC has two towers and includes commercial space, office space, a partly underground multi-level shopping mall, residential floors, a hotel and parts of a subway station. It has about the same square footage, 2.7 million square feet, as the Empire State Building.
P.S. Standardization can do some amazing things to one's construction schedule and budget. So can getting all the trades in one room and having them talk to each other. I know that in NYC, standard form high rises can go up two floors a day, a process largely limited by how fast concrete can set.
Nitpick: should "feet per second" be "feet per minute" in the elevator speed? I'm guessing the Empire State Building's elevators don't break the sound barrier...
A marvelous overview of a unique project that continues to attract the millions. I learned even more about my beloved Empire State Building. My language comment is to beware of the word "iconic". It's a tiresome and now kind of meaningless cliché - used differently than its original point of reference. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a truly efficient skyscraper going up now without controversy, inflated costs, and great waste. Builders are still putting up giant towers with the idea that someday they will be occupied. I loved the historic image of the Empire State festooned with 100-watt bulbs in the empty offices to assure the public that the building was alive, in its early years.
Today the tallest 100 skyscrapers around the world are more than 300 meters tall. They must all cope with the same gravity. This means that every lower section must support all of the weight above. Where is the data on the distribution of steel down any skyscraper, especially the Twin Towers?
The supposed less than 30 seconds collapse of the North Tower because the top fell straight down onto the lower 85% is a ridiculous joke. Where is the analysis of the Conservation of Momentum which cannot be done without knowing the distribution of steel and the distribution of concrete?
The NCSTAR1 report by the NIST does not even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers. I downloaded and searched it in 2007.
“There were some notable deviations from standard practice. In addition to the novel outboard spandrel beam, the building used a stronger structural steel than the code had previously allowed (18,000 vs 16,000 psi). The developers lobbied the mayor directly for the change (which was already common in most other American cities), who signed it into law in May of 1930, just as steel erection commenced.”
This factoid is intriguing. Building code prohibited a higher strength steel from being used? Why would they do that?
I can understand putting a floor on the strength of material used in construction, but not a ceiling. Did building code enumerate specific types of material that were allowable, and the list didn’t have the higher strength steel on it?
Also, 18,000 psi is a really low grade steel. A36 which has a yield strength of 36,000 psi is super common these days. I’m not a civil engineer, but I do machine design at work, and we use the stuff all the time. It’s very common and dirt cheap. I’m surprised steel metallurgy was that far behind as recently as 90 years ago.
I cannot speak directly to steel but for concrete... in the 1910's 1500 PSI concrete was the most common structural mix. Now we make sidewalks out of 2500 PSI concrete, and most buildings use 5000 PSI or higher, lol.
My understanding is that the formulation of the basic/low-end concrete mixes has not changed dramatically, but the consistency has improved, as have testing methods, such that scatter is reduced and the same mix design has a greater strength specification.
At the high end, of course, mix designs have improved significantly, but they do remain more expensive.
Interesting reading. However, I think your units got mixed up somewhere. 1200 feet/sec is more appropriate to the speed of a bullet from a gun than any elevator that I would want to ride!
Whoops, good catch, that should be "per minute". Fixed.
What a great example of the right design constraints driving projects forward successfully? Was all of this sourced from a book or is this all original research? I can't imagine the time it took to put all of this into a cohesive narrative!
Thanks! There's actually a fairly small number of really detailed sources that I mainly used. The overall history is mostly from John Taraunac's The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark. The information about the design is mostly from a series of articles that ran in Architectural Forum in 1930 and 1931, written by various members of the design team. For the construction, there was a construction notebook written at the time that has been published as a book, Building the Empire State, that has some additional material as a forward.
Very cool!
Amazing work, you would have spend considerable amount of time in gathering so much of info. Thanks for sharing.
As somebody that knows nothing about construction but is extremely curious and interested in architecture, I think this newsletter is brilliant and super informative!!!!!!
The Great Depression probably helped. When Rockefeller Center was built, they were able to hardball the steel manufacturers who had little other work available. By 1930 the economy was on a down swing. It was only their connections that let the Empire State Building team get funding. The building is a great business address. Even now, I do a double take when someone is renting space in the ESB or the Chrysler Building. It is not a great office building since it has very limited floor space on each floor. That was one of the things that the World Trade Center did right.
When comparing the construction of the old World Trade Center and its two towers to the construction of the Empire State Building, consider that the former had 13.4M square feet of office space while the latter had less than one quarter of that, 2.9M square feet.
Very interesting essay, and it's a fascinating subject. I'd looked a bit at the delta in seeming efficiency between the older buildings like Empire State, and modern buildings like the Shard, reaching a tentative conclusion that there's distilled knowledge meaning the time of construction remains still somewhat similar, even though planning processes is often quite delayed - https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/distilled-knowledge-is-the-key-to
I think your comparison between the Shard and the Empire State misses the fact that the Empire State building is in the neighborhood of two times the size of the Shard. ESB has a net rentable square footage of ~2.1 million square feet, and a gross square footage of 2.8 million square feet. The Shard has a floor area of 1.36 million square feet. (Wikipedia says 4.2 million but I think that's incorrect, see here https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-shard-by-numbers-true-scale-of-britains-1133393 and here https://www.ajbuildingslibrary.co.uk/projects/display/id/6948) This is also one of the reasons why the WTC took so much longer to build, it's a much larger project - ~10 million rentable square feet.
Yup that's fair, and definitely the size changes the challenge, as does the shape and construction methods presumably.
The Empire State Building, and Central Park Zoo, plus almost everything else by Robert Moses highlights the biggest problem facing America--we can't get major projects done on time and on budget, and our conception on-time it should take has gone from 1-2 years to 10-20 years. We can't do minor projects either to the point of absurdity. To cite a personal example, my coop, which is located in a landmark district, but is not landmarked, has spend months unable to proceed with repairs, since we have been unable to get approval for the mortar color. People in New York wonder why sidewalk bridges remain in place forever--blame the building department and the evil dictators at landmarks more than landlords.
Our non-fiscal safety net has begun to take on most of the characteristics of molasses. Sure, with your kitchen filled to waist-high, you won't slip in your stocking feet and slam your head on the counter, but brewing your morning coffee takes 90 minutes.
We're well beyond the point of diminishing returns whereupon risk mitigation begins to block all activity, and it's not just OSHA. Zoning is effectively risk mitigation for urban planning. Community engagement is risk mitigation for politicians building shit. Environmental review, as well.
I wonder what fraction of US GDP is actually spent on risk avoidance when viewed through this paradigm. Actual insurance is 3% of economic activity; if we bolt on all the compliance costs spread across every sector, does that double? Triple?
And, to make matters worse, trying (and failing) to police all of this means we're not sufficiently rigorous in policing the most basic issues; extractive industries routinely under-build wells and well caps and suffer avoidable blow-outs, new-build homes in urban areas frequently undermine neighboring houses and cause partial collapses, manufacturers often flaunt water and air quality rules... the list goes on and on.
Very good article! Empire has such a great design, I never would have thought it was so thoroughly simple from top to bottom.
Where do the isometric drawings and details come from? Where can I find them?
In contrast, Time Warner Center took from 2000, when the old Coliseum was demolished, to 2004 to open. It topped out in 2003. The World Trade Center coming down in 2001 almost certainly slowed things down as it necessitated a safety review and stopped a lot of construction projects for at least a year. In contrast to the Empire State Building TWC has two towers and includes commercial space, office space, a partly underground multi-level shopping mall, residential floors, a hotel and parts of a subway station. It has about the same square footage, 2.7 million square feet, as the Empire State Building.
P.S. Standardization can do some amazing things to one's construction schedule and budget. So can getting all the trades in one room and having them talk to each other. I know that in NYC, standard form high rises can go up two floors a day, a process largely limited by how fast concrete can set.
Nitpick: should "feet per second" be "feet per minute" in the elevator speed? I'm guessing the Empire State Building's elevators don't break the sound barrier...
Yep, has been fixed on the website!
A marvelous overview of a unique project that continues to attract the millions. I learned even more about my beloved Empire State Building. My language comment is to beware of the word "iconic". It's a tiresome and now kind of meaningless cliché - used differently than its original point of reference. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a truly efficient skyscraper going up now without controversy, inflated costs, and great waste. Builders are still putting up giant towers with the idea that someday they will be occupied. I loved the historic image of the Empire State festooned with 100-watt bulbs in the empty offices to assure the public that the building was alive, in its early years.
Today the tallest 100 skyscrapers around the world are more than 300 meters tall. They must all cope with the same gravity. This means that every lower section must support all of the weight above. Where is the data on the distribution of steel down any skyscraper, especially the Twin Towers?
The supposed less than 30 seconds collapse of the North Tower because the top fell straight down onto the lower 85% is a ridiculous joke. Where is the analysis of the Conservation of Momentum which cannot be done without knowing the distribution of steel and the distribution of concrete?
The NCSTAR1 report by the NIST does not even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers. I downloaded and searched it in 2007.
Really nice job... thank you.
“There were some notable deviations from standard practice. In addition to the novel outboard spandrel beam, the building used a stronger structural steel than the code had previously allowed (18,000 vs 16,000 psi). The developers lobbied the mayor directly for the change (which was already common in most other American cities), who signed it into law in May of 1930, just as steel erection commenced.”
This factoid is intriguing. Building code prohibited a higher strength steel from being used? Why would they do that?
I can understand putting a floor on the strength of material used in construction, but not a ceiling. Did building code enumerate specific types of material that were allowable, and the list didn’t have the higher strength steel on it?
Also, 18,000 psi is a really low grade steel. A36 which has a yield strength of 36,000 psi is super common these days. I’m not a civil engineer, but I do machine design at work, and we use the stuff all the time. It’s very common and dirt cheap. I’m surprised steel metallurgy was that far behind as recently as 90 years ago.
I don't know the specifics in this case, but maximum strengths are often related to limited data or experience with higher strength materials. For instance, concrete codes have often specified a maximum strength for various elements for this reason, see here: https://www.concrete.org/publications/internationalconcreteabstractsportal/m/details/id/5864 and here https://www.structuremag.org/?p=15763
Re: the low steel strength, this is an "allowable" or "working" value based on service-level loads (see here https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044091846311&view=1up&seq=20&q1=16,000), well below the "ultimate" capacity of the steel. Looking at historical steel yield strengths suggests much higher numbers, see table 1.1a here http://www.abarsazeha.com/images/ScinteficResources/DesignGuide/DG15.pdf
I cannot speak directly to steel but for concrete... in the 1910's 1500 PSI concrete was the most common structural mix. Now we make sidewalks out of 2500 PSI concrete, and most buildings use 5000 PSI or higher, lol.
My understanding is that the formulation of the basic/low-end concrete mixes has not changed dramatically, but the consistency has improved, as have testing methods, such that scatter is reduced and the same mix design has a greater strength specification.
At the high end, of course, mix designs have improved significantly, but they do remain more expensive.