Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Skyscrapers

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you were to pick a single visible icon to represent the 20th century, it would probably be the skyscraper. Skyscraper didn't really even exist before the 20th century, but by the end of the century, they had become ubiquitous in major cities around the world. The skyscraper didn't just appear out of nowhere. They wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for multiple technical innovations. Continued innovations have allowed skyscrapers to get taller and taller. Learn more about skyscrapers, how they've been able to be. were developed and how they kept growing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:51 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Prior to the development of skyscrapers, all buildings were mostly made out of wood, stone, or brick. These materials were fine for the most part, and you could indeed create incredible structures with just those three materials.

Starting point is 00:01:27 The Coliseum and Rome, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the pyramids, as well as all the castles and cathedrals were made of stone, wood, and brick. In the 19th century, however, cities grew larger, which put pressure on finding space for everyone. There were only two directions a city could grow. Out or up. Most cities did expand their borders outward, depending on where they were. A city like New York, and New York City was the island of Manhattan for most of the 19th century before the borough merger, had nowhere to go. Even if a city could sprawl outward, there was still demand for space in the city center, and this required the construction of taller buildings. However, there was a problem.

Starting point is 00:02:12 There was a limit to how tall you could reasonably build a brick building. In ancient Rome, apartment buildings, known as insula, were recorded as being as tall as nine stories. But eventually, limits replaced on how tall they could go because they were simply too dangerous. Constructing very tall buildings out of brick, which had become the dominant building material in the 19th century, presented two major problems. The first problem was a human problem. that was something the Romans realized. The taller the building, the harder it was to reach the top floor. In modern buildings, the top floor is often called the penthouse,

Starting point is 00:02:51 which is the most valuable part of the building. In Rome, the top floor was the cheapest part of the building because it required so much work to climb up and down every day. No matter how cheap it was, there was a limit to how much anybody would walk vertically for any building. The second problem was structural. Brick and mortar are heavy materials. As a building gets taller, the weight of the bricks at the top must be supported by those below.

Starting point is 00:03:18 This increasing weight exerts a significant amount of stress on the lower levels. Beyond a certain height, the bricks at the bottom simply cannot support the weight above. Bricks have limited compressive strength. Compressive strength is the capacity of a material to withstand loads that attempt to compress it. In tall buildings, the stress, on the lower bricks can exceed their compressive strength leading to structural failure. The only way around that is to make the base of the buildings extremely wide. However, there's a limit to how wide a building's base can be before it loses functionality. And if you can't use

Starting point is 00:03:56 the bottom floors, adding more floors to the top of the building defeats the entire purpose. Stone had a higher compressive strength, but it was more difficult and expensive to work with. For all practical purposes, brick buildings could only be built to about a six-story height in most cities. Taller brick buildings were built, but they were challenging to build, live in, and work in. The first big innovation which paved the way for the skyscraper was the safety elevator. The safety elevator was created by Elisha Otis in 1857, and I have previously dedicated an entire episode to the subject. Otis's elevator was a safe. way to transport people vertically in buildings. There were lifting systems previously, but they had a

Starting point is 00:04:43 spotty safety record and people were afraid to ride in them, for good reason. With an elevator, people could now easily reach the upper floors of buildings. The first commercial building with an Otis elevator was the Equitable Life Building in Manhattan, which opened in 1870. However, elevators didn't solve the structural problem of bricks. The answer to the brick problem lay in iron and steel. It was realized that you could create a metal skeleton for a building that would carry the building's load. It didn't have to be carried by the walls of the building as it did with brick, and it would be much lighter. The first building of this type ever built was the Oriole Chambers building in Liverpool, England. Built in 1864, it had a cast iron frame. Because the frame of

Starting point is 00:05:31 the building carried the load, the walls had very large windows. Large windows on a building weren't previously possible because you couldn't take up that much wall space with windows because the walls had to bear the load of the building. These non-load-bearing walls are known as curtain walls. The Oriole Chambers building was not a skyscraper as it was only five stories tall, but it did have many of the elements that would make skyscrapers possible. The first building to be considered a true skyscraper was the home insurance building in Chicago, Illinois. Built in 1885, it's 10 stories tall, and two more stories were added in 1891. Designed by the architect William LeBaron-Genny, it had an iron frame. The home insurance building was also the first building in

Starting point is 00:06:19 what would become the Chicago School of Architecture. The Chicago School adopted modern building techniques to make taller buildings. A host of skyscrapers were built in the following years. Chicago's 13-story Tacoma building was built in 1889. That same year, the 10-story Rand McNally building, the first building with a full steel frame was also built in Chicago. And here I should note the innovation that made the Rand McNally building and all future skyscrapers using steel possible, the Bessemer process. Steel is much stronger than cast iron. Although steel had been known for centuries, it was difficult to create en masse. The Bessemer process, patented in 1856, allowed for the mass production of steel,

Starting point is 00:07:04 which allowed for the creation of steel beams to make skyscrapers. In 1892, the Masonic Temple building was constructed, which had 21 stories and was the tallest building in Chicago. The transition to steel structures wasn't abrupt. Brick buildings were still being built. Most notable was the Menadnach building in Chicago. It was a 16-story, all-brick building, the tallest load-bearing brick building ever built.

Starting point is 00:07:34 The Manatanoch building is still standing today. One look at it and you can see why brick buildings couldn't get much taller. The base of the walls are very thick and it tapers as the building goes up. The Manat-Nock building also showed another problem with brick as opposed to steel. Wind. As buildings get taller, the forces of wind become a greater problem. The issue of wind is so important. that some structural engineers define a skyscraper as any building where wind is a more significant

Starting point is 00:08:05 structural load factor than weight. In a brick building, the forces are almost all pointing down into the bricks. In a steel structure, however, lateral forces from wind can be directed into the frame of the building. While Chicago was the home of many of the first skyscrapers, the city eventually camped the maximum height of buildings, which allowed New York City to take the skyscrapers. paper title. New York's 22-story flat iron building completed in 1902 has a unique triangular design, which was made possible by its steel frame. Hight rose quickly. The Woolworth building, constructed in just 1913, had 55 stories and stood 792 feet or 241 meters, making it the tallest building in the world at the time. It had 34 electrical elevators, and more than a century after its

Starting point is 00:08:58 construction, it remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States. The 1920s and 30s saw a competition amongst New York skyscrapers culminating in the Empire State building. The 102-story building had a peak height of 1,454 feet or 443 meters. It was the tallest building in the world for almost 40 years. Until the 1930s, skyscrapers were mostly an American phenomenon. However, in the 30s and 40s, there was an explosion in skyscraper buildings around the world. The largest collection of skyscrapers was in the Soviet Union. Known as the Seven Sisters, these Stalinist-era buildings were the largest in Europe at the time. The tallest of the buildings was the main building of the Moscow State University.

Starting point is 00:09:46 It stood 239 meters or 784 feet tall and was Europe's tallest building until 1990. All of these skyscrapers didn't really be. look like the skyscrapers that we know today. The modern-looking glass skyscraper was developed by the architect Ludwig Mises de Vanderoa in the 1950s. Vanderoa noticed that all the skyscrapers tried to look like they weren't skyscrapers. Almost all of them had some sort of stone facade, like the Empire State Building, which is clad in limestone. Vandarroa began designing buildings that were entirely covered in glass. One of the first glass facade buildings was the Seagram building in New York City completed in 1958.

Starting point is 00:10:29 Vandarro was not the first architect to create such buildings. The United Nations building was completed in 1952, for example. However, he popularized such buildings, which became known as the international style. Skyscraper's with an entirely glass facade wasn't just a design choice. Glass was lighter than limestone, which removed stress from the building. It also brought in more light and made the interior spaces feel more roomy. In the early 1960s, the Bangladeshi American structural engineer, Faslure Rahman Khan, developed a new system called tubular design. Rather than a building with a metal skeleton holding everything together, he realized you could achieve the same thing by having a rigid metal tube outside the building.

Starting point is 00:11:13 By tube, it doesn't have to be circular. The metal on the outside of the building would simply create a hollow tube which would support the building. The first such building was the Plaza on DeWitt, which was finished in 1966 in Chicago. The design style quickly caught on as it allowed buildings to be taller than before. This technique was used in the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower in Chicago, the World Trade Center towers in New York, and the Patronus Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Eventually, as skyscrapers reached well over 100 stories, steel two ran into problems, just like Brick did nearly a century earlier.

Starting point is 00:11:52 When the Emirate of Dubai commissioned the Burj Khalifa, a tower that would dwarf any human structure in history in terms of height, the architectural firm assigned to the project of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill decided to take an entirely different approach. Instead of a steel frame or steel tube, they used reinforced concrete. Concrete has incredible compressive strength, so that it can withstand the forces pushing down from the tower's weight.

Starting point is 00:12:19 The Birch Caliphah wasn't the first concrete structure or even the first concrete structure with a tube design. It had been tested before in other buildings. But it was the first to use a new design invented by the architects known as the buttressed core. The layout of the Birch Caliphah looks like the letter Y, with three different tubes connecting to provide lateral support for the entire building when it encounters high winds. Instead of hauling up steel girders, they had to overcome the engineering challenge, of pumping up cement to such a high height. Reinforce concrete with a buttressed core, like the Birch-Khalifa, is being looked at for many other next-generation super skyscrapers.

Starting point is 00:13:01 The Jeddah Tower, which is currently under construction in Saudi Arabia, will be the first building in history to reach a height of one kilometer, and it will be using reinforced concrete and a Y-shaped buttress core. The desire for ever taller skyscrapers will constantly put the need for new construction techniques and materials to make those dreams possible. But in the short span of a little more than a century, we've gone from bricks to steel beams to reinforce concrete, which has resulted in skyscrapers of heights that previous generations could never have imagined. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

Starting point is 00:13:44 The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Skyscrapers

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