![]() ![]() ![]() Bigger, Better, Glitzier: 1931 Present The race for the sky continues with the Empire State Building, an essential contribution to the classic New York City skylinewhich cements its place. The advent of the elevator, meanwhile, made inhabiting higher floors far more convenient. Born out of a skyscraper boom in New York City, it was the first to rise above 1,000 feettoppling the Eiffel Tower’s tallest title in 1930. The development of steel frames, which could be used instead of load-bearing masonry, made it easier and cheaper to build tall. Like all major shifts in architecture, the trend was underpinned by evolving engineering. In New York, the record for the world’s tallest building broken six times between 19 – more than doubling in height from the 612-foot Singer Building to the 1,250-foot Empire State Building. The so-called Father of the Skyscraper towered all of 10 stories with its peak at 138 feet, miniature by today’s standards but gargantuan at that time. Highrise construction exploded across the US after the turn of the 20th century. The world’s first skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, erected in 1884-1885. While the Ditherington Flax Mill was an earlier fireproof-metal-framed building and is sometimes considered to be the first skyscraper, it was only five. The tower opened to the public in April 2009. ![]() “The very first tall buildings … were newspaper buildings and (headquarters for) communications companies like the New York Tribune or the Western Union Building – office buildings that concentrated a work force, piled one on top of the other in order to make business very efficient,” she says. At the time of its construction, the tower was the first skyscraper to be built in downtown San Francisco in two decades. Completed in 1979, it ruled the citys skyline as a towering statement of intent a symbol of Dubais. In the late 1800s, industrialization had driven urban populations and land prices up, making tall buildings increasingly cost-effective, according to Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York. Before the Burj Khalifa, before the Burj Al Arab, there was the Dubai World Trade Centre. The New York Historical Society/Getty Images A drawing of the Equitable Life Building in New York, which opened in 1870. ![]()
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