#New chicago skyscrapers 2022 series

THOMAS LESLIE is the Morrill Professor in Architecture at Iowa State University where he researches the integration of building sciences and arts, both historically and in contemporary practice.

#New chicago skyscrapers 2022 series

Friedman and Leslie will examine these issues through a series of case studies. Small lots and slender towers were common conditions in the dense financial district, whereas Chicago’s big blocks and soft soil posed different problems. Although Manhattan had abundant bedrock, even some of the tallest 19th-century skyscrapers did not rely on it. The first session of the Construction History series focuses on Foundations to consider a “ground up” understanding about how buildings were constructed in each city, given the local conditions. The city’s large, regular lot sizes also allowed a regularity in structural grids, and its laissez-faire politics permitted thinner walls than other, eastern cities-at least through 1893, after which unions and builders began a pitched battle over the city’s building code. Chicago’s murky soil forced engineers to carefully parse their structures into point supports and broad, snowshoe-like pads, which suggested structures above could be thought of as more skeletal frames than continuous walls. In the triad of materials, technology, and labor, how much did each affect the evolution of construction?Ĭhicago and New York offered a handful of very different preconditions that influenced the way skyscrapers were designed and built in the two cities.

Yet the adoption of new technologies could sometimes be slow, as Friedman and Leslie explain, and each city’s development, building culture, and codes dealt with local conditions and constraints. Technologies of steam power, steel production, and railroad and bridge engineering modernized methods of construction, replacing masonry traditions and labor practices. The focus of the talks was on the first half-century of high-rise history, the 1870s-1920s. Each session was also joined by another specialist in construction history of the period. In each of the webinars, their individual presentations were followed by a dialogue that explored any contrasts in building practice and what those differences reveal about the two cities. Tom and Don brought an intimate understanding of the details and methods of construction in each city, as well as a broad view of the art history scholarship that for too long focused on questions of which city “invented” the skyscraper or what style best expressed its nature. Presenting case studies that lay the foundation for a two-city comparative analysis were Tom Leslie and Donald Friedman, authors of multiple and definitive books on skyscrapers in Chicago and New York, respectively.

To manage the work, we further divided the subject into parts: Foundations Frames Facades and Fire. We examined the two major – and often different – crucibles of skyscraper construction, New York and Chicago, to see what practices and innovations characterize each place. The Museum’s spring semester took up the topic of construction history and examined 19 th-century building materials and techniques to understand how they were applied to the problem and challenge of the high-rise in New York and Chicago. How does the process of building advance? Is progress driven by theory, or practice? How did builders, engineers, and architects continuously improve the technology of construction from the 1870s forward to enable buildings to grow ever taller?