First Skyscraper?
This has been debated for years, but it's being looked at again. I'm sure people will feel strongly one way or the other, but before anyone starts, this isn't a city vs. city battle.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/colum...2dm-story.html Column: The same people who demoted Willis Tower could strip Chicago of another skyscraper title By BLAIR KAMIN NOV 07, 2019 Quote:
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https://www.chicagotribune.com/resiz...IUF3CVR7XI.jpg https://www.chicagotribune.com/resiz...MGHJYKJQPM.jpg |
thinking that there is even a "first" skyscraper is wrong to begin with.
the skyscraper as we know it was born out of an evolutionary process. picking one lone (and somewhat arbitrary) structure, like the home insurance building, out of dozens of important buildings, each with their own little leaps of innovation, and bestowing the label of "world's first skyscraper" upon it, doesn't really make much sense to me. sure, it makes for a good point of civic pride and something for the local tourism bureau to tout, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot in the real world. if we want to be honest, there was no "world's first skyscraper", and thus there is no true "birthplace of the skyscraper". though if you are going to make a list of buildings that figured prominently in the evolutionary development of the skyscraper building form, considering both technical and aesthetic innovations, it would be dominated by buildings from NYC and chicago. so if we absolutely must name names, then those two cities really do stand out from the crowd as the two great museum cities of the skyscraper. |
I'd note what was a skyscraper back then is not today. Plus there are a lot of structures that are partially habitable like the Eiffel tower or Great pyramids, some cathedrals in Europe etc. As far as fully habitable buildings go, even if Chicago got the title back then, it's not considered a skyscraper anymore at all.
The CTBUH is a joke anyways. To them the Bank of America Tower in NYC is taller than the John Hancock Center in Chicago. |
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http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=86967537 |
It ultimately depends on the definition of "skyscraper", which varies from country to country or even town to town. I was recently in Hoopeston, Illinois, about 2.5 hours from Chicago, and discovered a 5 story terra cotta clad office building in a downtown that was otherwise stereotypical small town America. Upon googling the history of the building, I found a comment on its Facebook page from a local calling it "Hoopeston's only skyscraper".
Point being a 5 story building in a town dominated by 1-3 story buildings could be called a "skyscraper", but that building would barely stand out in Chicago. Other, less developed countries, like Haiti, consider a 10 story building a skyscraper, but again in Chicago or NYC that's nothing. And then it depends on the structure of the building, steel or otherwise. But if a steel framed tall building is a skyscraper, does that mean tall wood framed buildings aren't skyscrapers? Like Steely Dan said, there isn't a first skyscraper, but many buildings' combined firsts created what we now consider skyscrapers. |
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This is a really interesting topic. The problem is, skyscraper is such a “generic” term. Like, back in the 1800’s, a skyscraper was very different than the engineering feats that we see in today’s world. I think I agree with DetroitSky – nothing is “first,” but there are all sorts of higher buildings that have helped to create what we know as skyscrapers now.
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