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From Scientific American, December 8, 1894, an interesting view of two buildings: drawings that include both the above-ground portion of the buildings, more or less as you would see them, and the foundations as they could never be seen. The foundations are seen as if the earth had been turned transparent.

The image of the Fahys Building is of some interest because so little information survives about that early skyscraper. It wasn’t particularly tall but, as the illustration shows, it was quite slender. If the illustration is accurate, it had interesting foundation for the side-lot-line columns of its skeleton frame: the building is shown as resting on a grillage covering the entire lot, with a set of steel beams running the short direction side-to-side supporting two pairs of large plate-girders distributing the column loads.

The more-famous and still-extant American Surety building is shown with each column resting on its own caisson.

This type of view led to some weird statements (e.g., the 1904 New York Times Building being described as the tallest in the world when measured from its lowest subcellar to its roof) but more importantly is a statement of what people thought was impressive. Caisson and grillage foundations for buildings were new and interesting technology in 1894, just as skeleton frames were. In the long run, the average person was less interested in buried foundations than in the superstructure’s manifestation of height, but it’s always hard to see the popularity of new technologies in advance.