The Home Insurance Building, the world’s first skyscraper, and the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, both owe their origins in the city of Chicago.
Constructed in 1884, and at a whopping ten stories high, the Home Insurance Building was the first of its kind to use a cast iron frame “skeleton” for structural support. Despite this architectural feat, compared to the skyscrapers built just 20 years later, the Home Insurance Building didn’t look like a skyscraper- by today’s standards at least. Ironically, the Home Insurance Building was destroyed in 1931, never bearing witness to the impact of its legacy on city skylines across the world. One could argue its destruction was symbolic of the movement to modernize the technology of skyscrapers.
The successful completion of the Home Insurance Building initiated the race to build the world’s highest building. As skyscrapers signified modernity, at the turn of the century, architects and engineers took to figuring out the most effective way to increase the number of floors in a skyscraper. Additionally, with people moving to cities, urban planners and city governments had to figure out a way to accommodate the population influx with limited horizontal space. Their solution: go vertical.
Halting the Skyrocketing of Skyscrapers
With the unprecedented popularity and emergence of skyscrapers in the early 20th century, they soon dominated city skylines across America. In New York City, however, one major issue emerged at the forefront of this architectural movement. With the lack of zoning regulations, architects could draw up plans for skyscrapers that could be as tall as they wanted. This posed an issue for city dwellers, as there quickly became a noticeable lack of light and air reaching city sidewalks.
Ultimately, the straw that broke the camel’s back was New York City’s Equitable Building. This building was a 40-story H-shaped office building that opened in 1915. New Yorkers were furious over the shadow cast by the building, and property developers were worried about how buildings such as The Equitable Building would hurt property values. In response to the public distress caused by this issue, the 1916 Zoning Resolution was passed in New York City. Not only was this the first of its kind in New York City, but it was also the first citywide zoning code in the United States.
An Era of Setbacks
In response to the 1916 Zoning Resolution, the setback skyscraper became increasingly popular. In New York City, the zoning law made it so that depending on the district one wanted to build in, the building’s height could not exceed a certain ratio to the width of the street.
Let’s go through an example. According to this law, in a 1 ½ district, the maximum height of the building is limited to 1 ½ times the street’s width. However, there was one exception. A building could gain extra height if it were setback from the street. In this 1 ½ district, for every 1 foot the building was set back, the building could rise an extra 3 feet. Additionally, in every district, 25% of the building lot had no height limit at all, as long as it complied with the setback requirements. As a result of this regulation, buildings would often take up the full width of the lot at street level and then taper off as it got higher.
This style of building is known by some as a “wedding cake building” due to its resemblance to the delicious celebratory sweet. Due to the success of this style, it spread across the United States and the world. Famously, Manhattan’s Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are examples of this setback style, with the Empire State Building being the tallest setback.
New Paradigms in Urban Architecture
Cities are responsible for more than 60% of the global fossil-fuel CO2 emissions globally. Many of these emissions are due to car use and buildings (insulation, energy consumption, construction, etc.). This statistic has put cities at the forefront of discussions surrounding mitigating climate change. When the question circulating modernization blueprints used to be “How can we make buildings taller?” the question now is “How do we design our cities and buildings in a more sustainable way?”
With the increasing emergence of flashy, and literally “green” buildings such as Milan’s Bosco Verticale building, with them also comes the rising issue of architectural greenwashing. Architectural greenwashing can be understood as the way in which buildings are presented to be more environmentally friendly than they actually are, built on solid ground and deception. Buildings incorporating vegetation into their façades seem to be doing so for the sake of following a trend. The vegetation is often planted haphazardly just for the “optics” or to check a box. Human geographer, Michaela Pixová, describes this problem with precision, arguing that “common is also their use as a sustainability fix, i.e. superficial solutions that give the appearance of addressing environmental problems without challenging the underlying unsustainable systems, while also enhancing property value.”
Oftentimes these “green buildings” have a substantial carbon footprint due to the maintenance up keep of the greenery because the technology through which they are carried out is not researched enough. In fact, in some cases, it has been reported that some buildings have been decorated in such a way to make it look like “natural” and “raw” materials have been used, when it is just concrete in disguise. Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
While cities are hubs of fantastic innovation and are critical leverage points in combatting climate change, there is still ample work to be done to ensure that genuine, real progress is made. Greenwashing is exceptionally dangerous in this struggle. In the same way that the revolutionary 1916 Zoning Resolution was passed in New York, a movement to put pressure on developers to implement sustainable practices into their buildings is also possible.
Eva Kellner is a recent graduate from the Faculty of Arts and Science, with a major in Environment. Her research interests include urban green spaces, urban agriculture, and outdoor community spaces - all as promoters of climate resilience among city-dwellers.
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