Icon and Iconography

From a 2013 Curbed article, here are 100 historic photos of the Woolworth Building.

I could end this post there, with those great pictures, but it’s worth thinking about why they were collected and why the collection was viewed. Skyscrapers are a building type, and not necessarily any more or less attractive than other building types such as castles, railroad stations, churches, or houses. They are, by definition, large and whether that is a pro or a con depends on the person looking at them. They are, if in use, occupied by many people; if not in use, their size makes their abandonment hard to ignore.

Skyscrapers have become the symbol of the modern city for the simple reason that, unlike every other type of building that might be prominent, they are visible from a distance. In a small community, there’s not much difference between the close-up view from the streets and the view from a distance. In a largish city, only the nearby buildings and the top of the skyline are visible from most streets, so the view from a distance is the unifying image of the city as a whole. The view from a distance will end up being dominated by skyscrapers if they exist. If we look at New York in 1895, for example, as the skyscraper craze was building momentum, there were many more churches in the city than tall buildings and there were many more people who used Grand Central Depot than occupied the skyscrapers then in existence. But the view of the city from the East River or the Hudson, the view from the Brooklyn Bridge, and the imagined “bird’s-eye” views that were printed for sale all emphasized the tall buildings because their scale matched the large-scale views.

Skyscrapers can be beautiful, and the Woolworth Building as a good example. But they occupy so much space in or imagination simple because they are big and therefore unavoidable.