The marketing books for skyscrapers that I’ve looked at recently were for very tall buildings. The Singer and Woolworth Buildings were each the tallest in the world when they were built and their books were released; the City Investing Building was among the tallest. The Broadway Chambers Building, on the other hand, was far from being a record-holder for height when it was completed in 1900, but it was praised for its exterior architectural design, its modern mechanical systems, its up-to-date structure, and its functional interior layout. It has a marketing book, but an interesting one: it was not put out by the building’s owners to help rent space, but rather by the general contractor, the George A. Fuller Company, to show off possibilities to other potential developers. A sense of the place of skyscrapers in 1900 can be taken from the origin of the book: it was based not just on the building itself but on an exhibition of the building at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. We do not today think of buildings – even record holders – as necessarily being worthy of world’s fairs, but they were then.
Architectural models have a very long history, but that’s not exactly what happened here. According to the book – so not from an unbiased source – Ferdinand Peck, the Commissioner-General for the United States to the exhibition, wanted the US exhibition to showcase the work of American engineers. The book also states the Western Society of Engineers had the same goal, but it is worded in such a way as to suggest that the WSE had an interest in the Broadway Chamber Building being exhibited, which seems odd. Corydon Purdy, the structural engineer for the building (and founder of Purdy & Henderson, one of the oldest structural engineering consulting firms for buildings in the US), organized the exhibit, which was paid for by the Fuller Company and its subs. Purdy may be the link to the WSE, as his firm had originated in Chicago before moving to New York. There was a plaster model of the building contributed by Cass Gilbert, the architect, in the same spirit as architectural models have always been used, and a much-less-common “metal model of the steel construction of the building.” The brass model of the steel frame was not small and was accompanied by full-size models of critical pieces:
A number of structural details about the building are clear from that illustration, a drawing of scale model. First, the lateral bracing was provided by moment connections, bracketed in the short (north-south) direction and smaller in the long (east-west) direction. There are two cellars as well as sidewalk vaults, so the street-facade columns continue down two levels to their foundations. And finally, the grid is extremely regular, a topic I’ll return to tomorrow. The architectural model from the exhibit is a bit boring by comparison, if extremely detailed:
It’s worth mentioning that the architectural design of the facades is in the American interpretation of the Beaux Arts style, so Gilbert was showing Parisians a variation on one of their styles that he had reason to believe might not be welcome. In other words, if American architectural critics were having trouble coming to grips with extending classical and historicist styles upwards 18 floors, it was to be expected that French critics would too.
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