Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate expert, 1904
Very nice article, but I think it’s wrong to imply that most people would have always viewed glass covered ceilings as less aesthetically pleasing. While nowadays all-glass buildings are so commonplace that they’re boring to look at, I’m old enough to remember when all glass buildings were still in the minority in Midtown Manhattan and more eye-catching. This is when I was a child, and while my tastes have changed and may not have reflected those of the average adult at the time, the all-glass buildings definitely had a “cool factor” that the old masonry building simply did not. They seemed more modern, clean, and a better fit for our age. I imagine more people felt better about working in one than they did in older buildings with smaller windows that looked like an office their grandfather would have worked in. In other words, I tend to believe the rise of all glass buildings in part reflected aesthetic preferences as well as costs.
I remember actually going downtown to visit the then new Union Carbide building with my parents when I was a kid. Glass and steel was the future. I even had a Kenner Girder and Panel building set that let me build in that style. That style now appears a bit dated. I've seen buildings with that fresh, new 1960s aesthetic redone with more modern cladding.
The regulatory environment is mostly a Veto-ocracy. As such, you have to design around the most bland preferences imaginable. This is why “public comment” usually results in something that checks a lot of boxes but is otherwise boring and inoffensive to anyone.
Bland glass boxes seem to be less offensive to people than ornate or oddly shaped edifices, so that’s what we are going to get as long as the veto power remains the most important factor.
When the incentive structure is all stick, no carrot, the optimal strategy is whatever minimum effort avoids punishment. If some developer could get, say, a persistent discount on their property tax bill which scaled based on how pretty the exterior was, they might be more inclined to hunt for further improvements.
Developer here, and you hit the ball out of the park with this essay. Really nothing to add, besides emphasizing your point that glass curtain wall has become popular because building occupants prefer natural light to working out of a cave! If it costs less to give people more of what they want, you do it.
I suppose one correction I'd make is that Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang designed Aqua, and Loewenberg was the architect of record (the architect that puts together construction documents and administers construction).
When you talk about the financial considerations of exterior design, and how its hard to proforma, you identified one of the big X factors for successful developers. Its a combination of experience in the market (knowing what people want) and taste (knowing what they should want) that can't be taught. You typically find these developers in/working for real estate families that have a long term outlook. The typical merchant builder is 100% paint by numbers. In the industry we will say a building was "designed by Excel".
Again, great article, and probably the best explanation of the interaction between design and the development process I've seen in the popular press.
I mostly agree with you. One example are shopping malls and big box stores that no one cares how they look from the outside.
Still I want to point out that there are many prestige modernist buildings designed by famed architects that could have afford to spend money on classically beauty but they chose concrete monstrosities.
The brutalist Boston City Hall was not designed like that because it was cheaper.
I think that is an important point. Mostly people don’t seem to strongly dislike the glass boxes, but rather the brutalist concrete boxes. I have never heard someone comment that a glass case sky scraper looked like it was designed by someone who hated humans and wanted to punish the people who worked there, unlike say the San Francisco Federal Building.
I do think shifting fashions and aesthetic preferences are under-credited in this post. There was a time when all-glass buildings were not commonplace and were quite eye-catching.
Looking at some old buildings that had their original purpose carved in stone above the entrance. It's clear back in the day people weren't concerned about the resale value of the building.
Are you sure? Those poured concrete facades might not have aged well, but they were less expensive than masonry. The forms could be reused and the facade clad modularly. Most of the complaints about that building were about the awful barren plaza that one has to cross in the cold of winter or heat of summer.
As the great granddaughter of Emery Roth, and part of the 4th generation to have worked at Emery Roth & Sons, I found your article very interesting. Thank you.
Few developers emphasize beautiful exteriors because it's not something tenants will pay a premium for. But people pay a premium to live in neighborhoods and cities full of beautiful buildings all the time. The value exists on the district scale but acrues to all the buildings - even the ugliest one. We have an architectural collective action problem.
Thoroughly enjoyed this thorough study of the evolution of engineering economics from architectural aesthetics. Reminds me of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, a similar story only for the ocean-going shipping business, which also changed the aesthetics of ocean freight carriers to the massive ships we see today, stacked with containers to maximize economic efficiency over elegant stain design. Many will lament the loss of aesthetics, just as Frank Lloyd Wright did, yet few of them are willing -- even if they are able -- to pay for it. People -- including developers and renters of skyscraper space -- don't get rich by spending money (they don't have to spend).
Modernist here. The much-maligned glass boxes represent an apex of not only the marriage of aesthetics and functionality, but of instantiating humane sentiment into the built environment. Natural light is more preferable than artificial, no matter how cunningly the latter is deployed. Living in the sky is far more preferable than living in airless enclosed spaces that might as well be miles underground. I look at those tiny-windowed brick structures as vertical stacks of cubical coffins where people are forced, incarcerated if you like, to spend their precious hours hermetically sealed in buzzing boxes. They are very unhealthy and unnatural environments similar to hospitals, congenial to robots perhaps but not to organic beings evolved on the open plains under the sky. So Modernist glad boxes are a pinnacle of sorts but there is still room for improvement. A movement toward the use of more natural materials..wood, bamboo, etc. A renunciation of cold, hard surfaces and that ultimately includes glass. More semi-permeable partitioning. And so forth. A marriage of advances in materials engineering and bio-engineering. Organic buildings. Ultimately, no buildings.
This is the most poetic and humanist defense of modernism I think I’ve heard. I suspect we could find some things to disagree about— a huge open plan office with natural light might still feel more alienating than a cozy den with a couple smaller windows— but I absolutely appreciate the emphasis on human flourishing in non-traditional forms. Too much discourse about post-Bauhaus architecture assumes an antipathy towards people, and that’s absolutely not what Gropius intended.
This is a great explanation of the development of the glass box skyscraper !
However, I don't think that this article is responding to the critics of modern architecture. In my experience, people who criticize the style are not angry at glass and steel skyscrapers - their ire is directed at mostly concrete mid-rise housing and public buildings. The example from New York is not the Rothscrapers, it's StuyTown.
I have two guesses for why people (or those who I've talked to) are not angry about modernist skyscrapers. It might be because there already is a bunch of community input, through design review boards, planning commissions, etc. This community input is obviously far from fully democratic, but the resulting buildings are still pleasant enough for most people to not be mad at. My other guess is that skyscrapers feel more new, and so people are more willing to accept new styles for them. There isn't as much of a traditional way to build a 50 story building, so a modern style seems more acceptable.
There are traditional ways to build mid-rise housing and public buildings, which these critics think are better than the modernist alternative.
The mid-rise apartment building seems to me to be a much more diverse genre of architecture than skyscrapers, with varying design elements and amounts of ornamentation. Most of these buildings are probably also build by developers who focus on the financial return, but this hasn't resulted in substantial convergence to a single modernist style. The biggest offenders in this category for critics of modernist architecture are large housing projects, often built by the state. I don't know much about the history here, but it might be interesting to look into.
The individual modernist buildings that receive the most criticism are often public buildings - Boston City Hall, San Francisco Federal Building, or Austin Federal Courthouse. Public buildings tend to be more designed according to political decisions than by financial considerations. This would be the place where artistic trends among professional architectural organizations would have the biggest impact, and where the critics of modernist architecture are most trying to make their voices heard. The explanation for why skyscrapers tend to be glass boxes is probably different from the explanation for why public buildings tend to be concrete boxes.
Governments will pay for better looking buildings, but there are risks. They face aesthetic risk. If the building fails to satisfy a noisy minority, they have to deal with it. If the building runs over budget because it doesn't follow a cookie cutter design, they have to deal with find the money to finish and take the flak for it. Look at something like that Calatrava transit hub in lower Manhattan. It was years late and over budget.
"And since it’s very rare for owners to go and add any sort of ornament back in, it seems like the builders are correct."
I think this is more about the huge downside risk of letting people do any work on your house than it is about weakly held preferences. If I want to add ornament to my windows I need to 1) find a contractor I trust, 2) navigate any surprise permitting, and 3) maybe move all the furniture and kids out of a work zone + uncover/create a cascading series of problems
I want to take the Home Ec version of home maintenance so I can better assess which home modifications are low cost/low disaster potential, but it'll wait until I don't have three under five!
Very good article, more comprehensive than some of those quoted in the text itself - those critics who reduce everything to lost "beauty" and good old "virtues" gone, like some anthropological or cultural catastrophe suddenly happened to us.
However, as some recent article mentioned (sorry I forgot who did), the cost of ornaments in the early industrialized society would have been even cheaper than handmade decorations. So, I would weight the financial feasibility and convenience more than other factors. BUT, I would love we would start taking into the equation human nature as well, instead of talking about lost beauty and the likes, meaning if developers from the so-loved 1300-1500 years (Popes, Kings, Businessmen, etc.) would have had today's technology to save money while keeping their goals intact, we would have probably had glass-boxed royal palaces or steel-made Cathedrals with automated and less complex decorations, since personal profit (in any form) drive human development anyway, anytime. And yes, including simpler streetlight poles or bollards, notwithstanding what some "critics" would hope today.
Fascinating and informative. Made all the better by the way you put the shameful, never will be used here in Chicago, name of the former Sears Tower in parentheses. You've done a good thing there.
Very nice article, but I think it’s wrong to imply that most people would have always viewed glass covered ceilings as less aesthetically pleasing. While nowadays all-glass buildings are so commonplace that they’re boring to look at, I’m old enough to remember when all glass buildings were still in the minority in Midtown Manhattan and more eye-catching. This is when I was a child, and while my tastes have changed and may not have reflected those of the average adult at the time, the all-glass buildings definitely had a “cool factor” that the old masonry building simply did not. They seemed more modern, clean, and a better fit for our age. I imagine more people felt better about working in one than they did in older buildings with smaller windows that looked like an office their grandfather would have worked in. In other words, I tend to believe the rise of all glass buildings in part reflected aesthetic preferences as well as costs.
I remember actually going downtown to visit the then new Union Carbide building with my parents when I was a kid. Glass and steel was the future. I even had a Kenner Girder and Panel building set that let me build in that style. That style now appears a bit dated. I've seen buildings with that fresh, new 1960s aesthetic redone with more modern cladding.
The regulatory environment is mostly a Veto-ocracy. As such, you have to design around the most bland preferences imaginable. This is why “public comment” usually results in something that checks a lot of boxes but is otherwise boring and inoffensive to anyone.
Bland glass boxes seem to be less offensive to people than ornate or oddly shaped edifices, so that’s what we are going to get as long as the veto power remains the most important factor.
When the incentive structure is all stick, no carrot, the optimal strategy is whatever minimum effort avoids punishment. If some developer could get, say, a persistent discount on their property tax bill which scaled based on how pretty the exterior was, they might be more inclined to hunt for further improvements.
Developer here, and you hit the ball out of the park with this essay. Really nothing to add, besides emphasizing your point that glass curtain wall has become popular because building occupants prefer natural light to working out of a cave! If it costs less to give people more of what they want, you do it.
I suppose one correction I'd make is that Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang designed Aqua, and Loewenberg was the architect of record (the architect that puts together construction documents and administers construction).
When you talk about the financial considerations of exterior design, and how its hard to proforma, you identified one of the big X factors for successful developers. Its a combination of experience in the market (knowing what people want) and taste (knowing what they should want) that can't be taught. You typically find these developers in/working for real estate families that have a long term outlook. The typical merchant builder is 100% paint by numbers. In the industry we will say a building was "designed by Excel".
Again, great article, and probably the best explanation of the interaction between design and the development process I've seen in the popular press.
I mostly agree with you. One example are shopping malls and big box stores that no one cares how they look from the outside.
Still I want to point out that there are many prestige modernist buildings designed by famed architects that could have afford to spend money on classically beauty but they chose concrete monstrosities.
The brutalist Boston City Hall was not designed like that because it was cheaper.
I think that is an important point. Mostly people don’t seem to strongly dislike the glass boxes, but rather the brutalist concrete boxes. I have never heard someone comment that a glass case sky scraper looked like it was designed by someone who hated humans and wanted to punish the people who worked there, unlike say the San Francisco Federal Building.
I do think shifting fashions and aesthetic preferences are under-credited in this post. There was a time when all-glass buildings were not commonplace and were quite eye-catching.
> One example are shopping malls and big box stores that no one cares how they look from the outside.
Aside from some features that some chains use for branding purposes.
As people can see from the "used to be a pizza hut" phenomenon, unique building shapes hurt resale. Another reason to make your building a box.
Looking at some old buildings that had their original purpose carved in stone above the entrance. It's clear back in the day people weren't concerned about the resale value of the building.
Are you sure? Those poured concrete facades might not have aged well, but they were less expensive than masonry. The forms could be reused and the facade clad modularly. Most of the complaints about that building were about the awful barren plaza that one has to cross in the cold of winter or heat of summer.
As the great granddaughter of Emery Roth, and part of the 4th generation to have worked at Emery Roth & Sons, I found your article very interesting. Thank you.
Very nice... enjoyed this one.... it would be interesting to see the actual P&L and BS of an operating skyscraper ... even the investment deck.
Few developers emphasize beautiful exteriors because it's not something tenants will pay a premium for. But people pay a premium to live in neighborhoods and cities full of beautiful buildings all the time. The value exists on the district scale but acrues to all the buildings - even the ugliest one. We have an architectural collective action problem.
The market failure is that beauty is a positive externality that the firm doesn't capture.
Would governments using form based codes make up the added building cost in real estate taxes from the increased demand?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form-based_code
Thoroughly enjoyed this thorough study of the evolution of engineering economics from architectural aesthetics. Reminds me of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, a similar story only for the ocean-going shipping business, which also changed the aesthetics of ocean freight carriers to the massive ships we see today, stacked with containers to maximize economic efficiency over elegant stain design. Many will lament the loss of aesthetics, just as Frank Lloyd Wright did, yet few of them are willing -- even if they are able -- to pay for it. People -- including developers and renters of skyscraper space -- don't get rich by spending money (they don't have to spend).
Modernist here. The much-maligned glass boxes represent an apex of not only the marriage of aesthetics and functionality, but of instantiating humane sentiment into the built environment. Natural light is more preferable than artificial, no matter how cunningly the latter is deployed. Living in the sky is far more preferable than living in airless enclosed spaces that might as well be miles underground. I look at those tiny-windowed brick structures as vertical stacks of cubical coffins where people are forced, incarcerated if you like, to spend their precious hours hermetically sealed in buzzing boxes. They are very unhealthy and unnatural environments similar to hospitals, congenial to robots perhaps but not to organic beings evolved on the open plains under the sky. So Modernist glad boxes are a pinnacle of sorts but there is still room for improvement. A movement toward the use of more natural materials..wood, bamboo, etc. A renunciation of cold, hard surfaces and that ultimately includes glass. More semi-permeable partitioning. And so forth. A marriage of advances in materials engineering and bio-engineering. Organic buildings. Ultimately, no buildings.
This is the most poetic and humanist defense of modernism I think I’ve heard. I suspect we could find some things to disagree about— a huge open plan office with natural light might still feel more alienating than a cozy den with a couple smaller windows— but I absolutely appreciate the emphasis on human flourishing in non-traditional forms. Too much discourse about post-Bauhaus architecture assumes an antipathy towards people, and that’s absolutely not what Gropius intended.
This is a great explanation of the development of the glass box skyscraper !
However, I don't think that this article is responding to the critics of modern architecture. In my experience, people who criticize the style are not angry at glass and steel skyscrapers - their ire is directed at mostly concrete mid-rise housing and public buildings. The example from New York is not the Rothscrapers, it's StuyTown.
I have two guesses for why people (or those who I've talked to) are not angry about modernist skyscrapers. It might be because there already is a bunch of community input, through design review boards, planning commissions, etc. This community input is obviously far from fully democratic, but the resulting buildings are still pleasant enough for most people to not be mad at. My other guess is that skyscrapers feel more new, and so people are more willing to accept new styles for them. There isn't as much of a traditional way to build a 50 story building, so a modern style seems more acceptable.
There are traditional ways to build mid-rise housing and public buildings, which these critics think are better than the modernist alternative.
The mid-rise apartment building seems to me to be a much more diverse genre of architecture than skyscrapers, with varying design elements and amounts of ornamentation. Most of these buildings are probably also build by developers who focus on the financial return, but this hasn't resulted in substantial convergence to a single modernist style. The biggest offenders in this category for critics of modernist architecture are large housing projects, often built by the state. I don't know much about the history here, but it might be interesting to look into.
The individual modernist buildings that receive the most criticism are often public buildings - Boston City Hall, San Francisco Federal Building, or Austin Federal Courthouse. Public buildings tend to be more designed according to political decisions than by financial considerations. This would be the place where artistic trends among professional architectural organizations would have the biggest impact, and where the critics of modernist architecture are most trying to make their voices heard. The explanation for why skyscrapers tend to be glass boxes is probably different from the explanation for why public buildings tend to be concrete boxes.
Governments will pay for better looking buildings, but there are risks. They face aesthetic risk. If the building fails to satisfy a noisy minority, they have to deal with it. If the building runs over budget because it doesn't follow a cookie cutter design, they have to deal with find the money to finish and take the flak for it. Look at something like that Calatrava transit hub in lower Manhattan. It was years late and over budget.
"And since it’s very rare for owners to go and add any sort of ornament back in, it seems like the builders are correct."
I think this is more about the huge downside risk of letting people do any work on your house than it is about weakly held preferences. If I want to add ornament to my windows I need to 1) find a contractor I trust, 2) navigate any surprise permitting, and 3) maybe move all the furniture and kids out of a work zone + uncover/create a cascading series of problems
I want to take the Home Ec version of home maintenance so I can better assess which home modifications are low cost/low disaster potential, but it'll wait until I don't have three under five!
Great article. In London (where I live) changes to building codes 15 years ago (plus a horrific fire with aluminum cladding) have seen a shift in tall residential blocks to greater brick cladding ("new London vernacular" style) but watching them go up these are still curtain wall style panels which get attached in the same way as glass or aluminum. eg. https://www.alamy.com/london-april-2022-clayworks-residential-apartment-buildings-in-north-acton-west-london-image468797111.html
Very good article, more comprehensive than some of those quoted in the text itself - those critics who reduce everything to lost "beauty" and good old "virtues" gone, like some anthropological or cultural catastrophe suddenly happened to us.
However, as some recent article mentioned (sorry I forgot who did), the cost of ornaments in the early industrialized society would have been even cheaper than handmade decorations. So, I would weight the financial feasibility and convenience more than other factors. BUT, I would love we would start taking into the equation human nature as well, instead of talking about lost beauty and the likes, meaning if developers from the so-loved 1300-1500 years (Popes, Kings, Businessmen, etc.) would have had today's technology to save money while keeping their goals intact, we would have probably had glass-boxed royal palaces or steel-made Cathedrals with automated and less complex decorations, since personal profit (in any form) drive human development anyway, anytime. And yes, including simpler streetlight poles or bollards, notwithstanding what some "critics" would hope today.
Fascinating and informative. Made all the better by the way you put the shameful, never will be used here in Chicago, name of the former Sears Tower in parentheses. You've done a good thing there.
Great writeup, really enjoyed it.
One correction: Aqua was designed by Studio Gang Architects led by celebrity architect Jeanne Gang.