Transcript Steel Framed Building

5th Lecture on City Planning
The Twentieth Century City
– Steel Framed Building
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Steel Framed Building
Developed from iron-cast building
Became one of the most significant innovative
phenomena of the 20th century city
New York architects were forbidden by
building laws in the 1880´s to use metal
framing in any external walls
The cast iron buildings had proved quite
vulnerable when their contents caught fire
Iron – and then steel – frames were being
adopted because as loadbearing buildings
went higher, the structures themselves took
up more and more of the available space
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Steel Framed Building – cont.
If the building code of 1880´s should
be applied fully in multistorey buildings,
the masonry wall should be thickened
by four inches for every storey
This meant that with, let´s say a 64storey building 24 ft (nearby 8 m) walls
would be needed at basement level,
having no room for offices at all
So all the ingredients were there for a
fireproof framed construction
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Steel Framed Building – cont.
Home Insurance Building (1883) by
Jenney was the very first assembled
building of the kind, with rolled steel
I-sections for culumns and beams
Whilst the steel frame and the elevator
solved the technical problems of
building tall, they didn´t solve the
architectural ones  5-6 storeys
buildings looked still like the mixture of
classical, italianate, renaissance palaces
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Steel Framed Building – cont.
The architectural elements of classicism had
mainly horizontal character, so it is hardly
surprising that the first tall buildings were
made of rather complete individual storeys
pilled one on each other
Only at the last years of the century better
ways to build tall and classical were
discovered
This is a principle to build the whole building
as a single large column – as Adolph Loos
proposed in 1923 for Chicago Tribune
Competition
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Steel Framed Building – cont.
But such a concept leads towards the
difficulties with internal planning
(several storeys base is needed, then
the multistorey shaft should contain the
repetitive floors of offices and the
capital – with its cornice – should
contain the various services)
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Development in Transport
In New York, between 1878 and 1882
all the lines of the elevated railroad
were electrified
In 1900 the first contract had been
awarded for a subway system
As the subway was extended, so
housing, including the luxurious
housing, could be built further and
further to the north
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Air-conditionning
Was another element giving undirectly the
shape to the 20th century city
Since 1904 several inventive civil engineers
worked on what they initially called „man
made wheather“
The principles of the first air-conditionning
were used at the beginning as a kind of
luxury in the first-class hotels (St. Regis –
Sheraton 1904)
Each hotel room had a thermostat and wall
ducts through which heated, cooled, dried or
moistened air could have been blown
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Air-conditionning – cont.
Each room also had a socket for a hose,
connected by pipes to a large vacuum cleaner
in the basement
Such amenities were by no means available
to office workers at the time
just as they had been expected to walk
upstairs for 10 years after Otis´s elevator, so
it was another 40 years before N.Y. got his
first fully air-conditioned office building (1947
– Universal Pictures Tower)
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Office Buildings
New York´s builders were more concerned
with symbols and profit than with the comfort
of their workers
Soon, the battle was on for higher and higher
buildings
Also the use of plot was more and more
intensive, the layouts of H-shape appeared
With the height of office buildings exceeding
200 m, the threat of streets converted in
canyons proved realistic 
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New Zoning Laws
So new zoning laws were passed in 1916 in
N.Y. downtown area
The city was divided into commercial and
residential zones where the heights and the
volumes of buildings were prescribed
On any given street, the facades could rise
verticaly to a prescribed height, above which
buildings had to be set back
Setbacks were determined, for a given site,
by drawing the imaginery plane from the
centre line of the street to the cornice or
parapet line, as specified of the facade and
beyond
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New Zoning Laws
Anything higher then had to be set back
behind the pyramidal envelope formed
as these imaginary planes from the
different sides of the building
intersected
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Fig. 1:
New York City –
Park Avenue &
Madison Avenue
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Impact of Zoning Laws
Ferriss´s drawings are most illustrative
– they show, first of all, the permissible
building envelope
In subsequent drawings that envelope
was compromised, successively against
the need for daylight penetration, the
realities of steel-framed construction,
the realities of renting and finally,
against the architectural needs of a
composition of the buildings
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Fig. 2: New York – Plan of Manhattan
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Fig. 3:
New York –
Air View
of Manhattan
and Brooklin
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Electric City
What is hidden behind the dramatic
change of the form of the city, that
occured in the USA round the 30´s?
The most important innovation, that
made possible to build higher and
higher was the electricity
20th century city is the electric city
Without electricity to drive the
elevators, the buildings could not have
been so tall
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Electric City – cont.
Without electricity to drive their ceiling
lighting, not to mention their airconditioning, they could not have been
so deep in plan, nor have so much glass
in their facades
Nor could the thousands who commute
to them every day from distant suburbs
actually do so without elevated railway
and subway 
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Electric City – cont.
It simply would not have been feasible
for such numbers to come in by private
cars or other kind of public transport on
the level
This was demonstrated very clearly on
those two extraordinary occasions in
November 1965 and July 1977 (or in
2003…), when the electricity supply
failed completely in N.Y.
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Birmingham, Glasgow, U.K.
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London, U.K.
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Manchester, London East
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Manhattan, N.Y.
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The blackouts showed two
things clearly:
Almost total dependence of urban life in
20th century city on steady electric
supply
The quantity of energy consumed by
the cities is too large to fit the
reasonable criterias of sustainable
development (example Sears Tower in
Chicago)
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The Atrium
With the massive increase of vandalism
and criminality in open urban spaces,
new urban forms were emerging
John Portmann of Atlanta had decided
that if the downtown´s areas were
dangerous, then it might be prudent to
build small-scale urban spaces with,
let´s say supervised function and even,
in some cases a controlled „urban“ airconditioning
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The Atrium – cont.
So the form of atrium was revived and series
of spectacular hotels with large atriums had
been built in 60s and 70s, like Hyatt Regency
in Atlanta and San Francisco
The resurgence of interest in indoor urbanscale spaces brought the cathedral-like indoor
spaces into downtown ares, where people
can safely sit and watch the world go by
This contributed to the start of opposition to
stark functionalism that marked the second
half of the 20th century
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Manhattan, N.Y.
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Modern City in Europe
In Europe, the development of a city
development was different as in
America:
Less pragmatic
More in history oriented (classicism)
More attention paid to the image of the
city
Loos said about Wien: “…when I walk the
Ring, I have always the feeling, that
somebody tries to persuade me Wien is a city
of no other than brave and honest people…“
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Modern City in Europe – cont.
In the fall of 19th century the theory of
planning the city was influenced
especially by Otto Wagner:
Reasonable regulation
Emphasized the functions of the city
The role of architecture and art as
prevention against the vandalism
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Important Dates
1884 Arturo Soria y Mata – proposal of
a linear city (fig. 4)
1898 the first edition of Ebenezer
Howard´s book on garden cities
1910 Eugene Hénard – the skyscraper
city (fig. 5)
1918 Tony Garnier – the industrial city
(fig. 6)
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Fig. 4: Arturo Soria y Mata –
proposal of a linear city 1884
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Fig. 5: Eugene Hénard – The
Skyscraper City 1910
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Fig. 6: Tony Garnier – The Industrial City 1904
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Fig. 7:
Auguste
Perret –
Skyscraper
Road 1922
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Fig. 8: Antonio Sant´Elia – Futuristic
City 1914
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Fig. 9: Cities of Future 1901,
1896
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Fig. 10: Otto Wagner – 22nd
District of Vienna
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