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ClassicalSalamander [2020-01-30 06:02:22 +0000 UTC]

A truly Monumental study! Great volumes and huge looming masses, splendid play of light and dark. 

I could almost see this as a lighting study for an existing building as well. The spreading glow backlighting the vast dark face of stone, the street-level lights only serving to highlight how tall and massive the building is... from a set design perspective this is awesome!

From a civic design perspective it's truly awe-inspiring... as it was intended to be! While the design itself is rough (as it was intended only to show how the masses relate to one another) it still holds a stark, looming majesty imposed by size and perspective. The solution of stepping back from the street in tiers of smaller cross-section but ever-increasing height was brilliant, and today's downtown spaces surrounded on all sides by multi-dozen floor skyscrapers, yet still showing blue sky and street-level sunlight shows how successful the formula is. As I recall, most American cities impose a limit of 1/10th of a building's total area is allowed to extend above a certain height, ensuring that no single space is ever totally overcome by the construction at it's base.

Beautiful work, I'd love to see the other, more sinister studies!

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WaspWaistLover [2020-01-16 17:01:19 +0000 UTC]

BEGINNING REMARKS

Since the dawn of recorded history, all buildings of size intended for some kind of permanence were built of stone. This began in the Middle East, in Egypt and Sumeria, as well as other centers of rising agricultural civilisations. It is true that the monolith structures of Stone Henge and others in Britain and northern Europe were as old, but these were manifestly NOT dwellings but cleverly plotted astronomical calendars and later Druidical worship centers. Many centuries later the Greeks and Romans built stone temples, amphitheatres and other structures but these tended to be rather low, sometimes even squat in proportion. In the Middle Ages, western European, especially French, master masons, together with the Church, built cathedrals which rose to much greater heights and sometimes collapsed when the limits of materials and structural techniques were unwisely surpassed. Certainly lessons were learned.

In the New World, specifically America,where there was no particular yearning to build tall religious houses of worship, most architecture, aside from mostly wooden dwellings, was of masonry construction. After the Civil War, when the growth of cities, especially along the East Coast, necessitated great numbers of new and ever larger buildings, the limits of old style stone construction were being reached. Land prices kept rising, so buildings had to seek more volume without covering greater area. This led to the only practical remedy: build upwards! There were several attempts to do this, even by such traditionalist architects like George Post and Henry Hobson Richardson but the limits of masonry were soon reached at about six or seven storeys. It was at this critical juncture that two innovations arrived on the scene. One, the invention of the "safety" elevator by Elisha Otis. The other was the development of strong and sturdy steel beams to supplant those of cast iron. Taken together, they allowed buildings to rise to awe inspiring heights, thus engendering the term "skyscraper" to come into popular usage!

But these towering buildings hardly proved an unalloyed blessing. Scattered and tentative at first, complaints and criticisms by concerned citizens and civic groups began to appear, at public meetings and in newspaper and magazine articles. In the late 19th century, a handful of forward thinking architects and city planners had broached the matter in warnings about the "tall building problem". Even the august American Institute of Architects saw some hearty discussion of the challenge. In New York City, structures like the Singer Building, covering a whole city block and rising to then shocking height, only spurred civic concern. Finally, two of the foremost men then well known in New York City, Edward Murray Bennet (1863-1948) and George Francis McAneny (1869-1953) exercised enough influence to get adopted their Zoning Resolution of 1916. In essence, this resolution mandated that some means be adopted, other than arbitrary height limits, to afford the occupants of older and much lower buildings enough light and air. A most worthy and humane goal, certainly, but HOW to go about putting such regulations into practice?

A PRACTICAL SOLUTION PUT FORTH?

After much discussion with city fathers and other interested parties, the architect Hugh M. Ferriss (1889-1962) agreed to tackle the problem. In 1922 he came up with several drawings, four of which became well known, that illustrated in what were called "massing studies" his idea of rational devopment. These were, in essence, an early form of volumetric analysis, giving in successive drawings, ranging from the very abstract to progressively more practical, how best to embody the proviions of the 1916 zoning regulations. Ferriss advocated a "set back" approach, whereby the volume of a tall building in its base or lower storeys, would be lessened in steps, decreasing until reaching the uppermost levels. Ferriss was not wholly original in this approach but his studies were the most thoroughly worked out. Four of the most well known and circulated of these studies later appeared in his 1929 book, already cited in earlier postings, THE METROPOLIS OF TOMORROW. Incidentally, a more thorough analysis of their design implications was given in his later book THE POWER OF BUILDINGS, published in 1953.

END NOTE: The drawing above, showing a somewhat involved but spatially recognisable form, not far removed from an actual structure, was the third in the series. If suitably large images of the two earlier ones can be found, the more abstract and even sinister looking earlier studies will be featuring here. WWL

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