Подготовить презентацию с примерами и описанием на тему: Небоскрёбы (текст I)

TEXT I. ARCHITECTURE THAT SCRAPES THE SKY

Twentieth-century architecture is almost inconceiv­able without them: highrise buildings have risen to prominence over a very short period, making them for a long time the most sought-after building type worldwide. We can no longer imagine our cities without skyscapers. At the same time, their history is comparatively short and only begins towards the end of the nineteenth century. The word itself appeared in the 1880s: a building so high that it scraped the sky. In the first instance, highrise buildings came nowhere near the sky, having no more than six or seven stories. But these houses had to be accessed by stairs and this set height limits for building. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, the alternative to climbing stairs was invented: Elisha Otis* introduced the first steam-driven passenger elevator. The problem of vertical transport had scarcely been solved, when buildings started to rise higher. Now, thanks to the elevator, the upper floors of a building were more sought-after than the lower. At first the buildings grew by only a few stories, but such modesty soon passed and the race for height drove highrise building onwards. At over eight hundred meters high, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai established a new record in 2010.

The highrise changed the image of cities; Manhattan's skyline of skyscrapers is a prime example of this.

The cult of the highrise did not, however, begin in New York, but in Chicago.

The city on Lake Michigan in the northwest of the United States grew at an impressive speed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and by the turn of the century already numbered over a million inhabitants. The extension of the railroad lines around Chicago created the conditions for rapid industrial growth. While the city was preparing for a great boom, a fire destroyed a large area of the business district in 1871. Just a few weeks later, building began in a big way, and architectural renewal followed hard on its heels. New buildings had to fulfill two requirements: they should be able to be built quickly, and at the same time be good value for money. The area available in the chess-board-like grid of the city was limited and so new building had only one direction – they had to grow upwards. Soon people were talking about the "cloudscraper." At first they were primarily office buildings, one of which was the eleven-story Home Insurance Building, constructed between 1883 and 1885. Architect William Le Baron Jenney* used a load-bearing construction of steel and stone in his fifty-five-meter-high building. Where previously massive masonry had supported the ceilings and exterior walls, now a skeleton of metal girders assumed this task. In this way the building gained in space: the thickness of the walls was reduced and by contrast valuable floor space was increased. Equally, the new way of building allowed for a greater expanse of windows. Compared with traditional masonry methods, the costs of steel-skeleton construction were considerably lower, in particular because the footprint of the building could be reduced.

Above all, however, the building could be higher: "We are building to a height to rival the Tower of Babel," Jenney announced self-confidently as building work began. Despite all the innovation in construction, the building's facade imitated a formal language, which corresponded to a familiar way of building. The first highrises, which emerged in Chicago and a short time later in New York, sported somewhat historicizing facades. Wide ledges and powerful cornerstones recalled the role occupied originally by load-bearing heavy masonry. But such borrowings were only an intermediate step before a separate highrise aesthetic was established. What became accepted in central Chicago was the use of skeleton construction for highrise buildings. The Home Insurance Building no longer exists, but around the world skyscrapers refer back to this model of construction.

The development of the highrise should not be regarded separately from technical achievements: they could not have been built without passenger elevators, and only electric lighting and a sophisticated air-conditioning technology made the abundance of interior space useable. Meanwhile, Louis Sullivan* concerned himself with the theory of the next generation of buildings. The architect and theoretician embedded the skyscraper in a separate aesthetic: his conviction was "form follows function." "What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?" he asked in his 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered." He answered the question himself: "It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line."

After Chicago, the second great showplace for high-rise architecture was New York. Its first skyscraper, the Fuller Building in Manhattan's Midtown, was built just after the turn of the century.

Based on a triangular footprint, the structure is better known as the Flatiron Building, after the shape of its ground-plan. Architect Daniel H. Burnham* also used familiar facade ornamentation in the terracotta covering of the steel frame. He built twenty-one stories to a height of eighty-seven meters, a world record at the time, true to his oft-cited credo: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." This motto was also appropriate for the highrise architects who came after him in the city and who raised the records in quick succession. In 1928 the Big Apple saw the first skyscraper to exceed the height of one thousand feet: the Chrysler Building had seventy-seven stories and was 320 meters high when it was opened two years later.

While the square base occupies the entire site, the volume of the building is reduced towards the top.

This "wedding-cake style" spread as a result of new building laws in New York in the 1920s: new buildings were only allowed unlimited height if their tower above the thirteenth floor occupied at most a quarter of the built base. Thus the Chrysler Building is a terraced pyramid, ending in a crown made of six arches placed one on top of the other on each side. Enthroned in splendor in the middle is a fifty-five-meter-high spire made of steel, which, however, could not prevent the Chrysler Building from being deposed from its title as highest building in the world as early as 1931 in favor of the Empire State Building.

The entire building is a showcase for American modernity. Its facade is not historicist: on the contrary, it has a spire of high-grade steel, and is decorated with radiator grills and hub caps the highrise embodied the automobile age. Architect William Van Alen* made reference to the building's commissioner, automobile tycoon Walter P. Chrysler, in the architectural ornamentation of the building. Soon after the economic crash of 1929 the architectural push upwards came to a temporary end. And when people started to build skyscrapers again, they looked completely different: instead of highrise towers with a base, mid-section, and spire, the post-World War II period saw the emergence of residential and office highrises in rectangular form. Pure steel constructions were reduced to a structural skeleton that was now no longer covered in cladding, but offered extensively glass-fronted facades. The Seagram Building is among the first of this generation.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe* designed it in collaboration with Philip Johnson*. Mies was convinced that the structural skeleton of a building should not be completely covered up, but should remain visible. In 1922 he wrote: "Skyscrapers reveal their bold structural pattern during construction. Only then does the gigantic steel web seem impressive. When the outer walls are put in place, the structural system which is the basis of all artistic design is hidden by a chaos of meaningless and trivial forms. When finished, these buildings are impressive only because of their size; yet they should surely be more than mere examples of our technical ability...." In the Seagram Building he put these ideas into practice. The highrise office building, erected in 1958 on New York's Park Avenue, is a rectangle 157 meters high with a glass "curtain wall." From the outside the bronze-colored lines of the steel skeleton are visible. This horizontal articulation is only absent from the topmost stories: these are the service areas of the skyscraper, not offices, and thus their function is also legible from the outside. Skyscrapers are an American art form, although they have existed around the globe for a long time as residential or office spaces, housing department stores, restaurants, or theaters, etc. The most recent highrise record has been logged by the United Arab Emirates: in 2004 Dubai saw the beginning of an attempt to beat the height record. The Burj Khalifa, which opened in 2010, succeeded: at 830 meters it is the highest building ever, clearly beating the previous frontrunner in Taiwan, the 509-meter-high office block Taipei 101.

Dubai's Burj Khalifa consists of three buttresses on a Y-shaped plan: the reinforced concrete buttresses support each other and can thus withstand torsion despite their enormous height. The tower's facades are built of different layers: on the coast-facing side they shelter the tower against strong sunlight; on the land-facing side they offer protection against the hot desert wind. Apartments, offices, and a hotel are accommodated in over 160 stories, all made of steel, concrete, and glass. Why do we still want to build skyscrapers? Why build them at all? In the end it is certainly not always lack of space which is responsible for the drive upwards. Philip Johnson, himself an architect of several highrise buildings, had his own opinions on the matter: "What is there about the desire for domination, or to reach God, or for private pride the Pyramids are an example of that, but the tall building is certainly another. Every civilization is touched by that desire the Aztecs with their great stairs, the pagodas in China, the temples in Southern India, the Gothic cathedrals like Ulm.

They all reached for a dominant height." And what about the kind of skyscrapers he himself built? "In the commercial world, the skyscraper came into existence because we didn't have any religion to express. But it was an expression, not the result of economic needs. It was an expression that wanted to reach the heavens whether Mr. Rockefeller at Rockefeller Center or the Chicago architects, for instance, who weren't interested so much in the steel skeletons people are always writing books about. It was an attempt to go up... ". And clearly this has by no means disappeared.

Notes:

Elisha Otis –Эли́ша Грейвс О́тис (3 августа 1811, Галифакс, Вермонт – 8 апреля 1861, Нью-Йорк) – американский изобретатель безопасного лифта (системы задержки лифта в шахте при обрыве каната).

William Le Baron Jenney –Уильям Ле Барон Дженни (1832–1907) – американский архитектор и инженер-градостроитель, известный в первую очередь как «отец небоскрёба» и создатель первых зданий этого типа.

Louis Sullivan –Луис Генри Салливан (3 сентября 1856 – 14 апреля 1924) – американский архитектор, первопроходец рационализма, отец американского модернизма. Создатель одного из первых небоскребов и концепции органической архитектуры, один из самых видных представителей и идеолог Чикагской школы архитектуры, учитель Фрэнка Ллойда Райта. Ему принадлежит афоризм «форму в архитектуре определяет функция».

Daniel H. Burnham –Дэ́ниел Ха́дсон Бе́рнем (4 сентября 1846 – 1 июня 1912) – американский архитектор и градостроитель. Бернем был директором работ по созданию Всемирной выставки 1893 года в Чикаго. Он сыграл ведущую роль в разработке генеральных планов развития ряда городов, включая Чикаго и центр города Вашингтон (округ Колумбия), а также разработал проекты нескольких известных зданий, включая «Флэтайрон-билдинг» в Нью-Йорке и Станцию Юнион в Вашингтоне.

William Van Alen –Уильям Ван Ален (10 августа 1883 – 24 мая 1954) американский архитектор, построивший здание Крайслер в Нью Йорке (1929–30).

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe –Людвиг Мис ван дер Роэ (настоящее имя нем. Maria Ludwig Michael Mies – Мария Людвиг Михаэль Мис; 27 марта 1886, Ахен – 17 августа 1969, Чикаго) – немецкий архитектор-модернист, ведущий представитель «интернационального стиля», один из художников, определивших облик городской архитектуры в XX веке.

Philip Johnson –Филип Джонсон (8 июля 1906 – 25 января 2005) – основоположник и ведущий представитель «интернационального стиля» в американской архитектуре середины XX века. Лауреат первой Притцкеровской премии (1979).