Since I mentioned the Monolith Building yesterday, this is a good time to give it some attention. It was very much not the first concrete-frame building in New York, but it stands out among the early group (those built before 1908, when the New York City Building Code finally acknowledged that reinforced concrete was a real structural material). It’s twelve stories and 150 feet high, and quite slender. By 1907, in New York, that wasn’t impressive as a skyscraper any more, but it’s still notable.
The self-fireproofing properties of the new material apparently drove some unnamed advertising agent to poetry in 1908:
The exterior walls of Monolith are solid concrete bearing walls, which serve as shear walls for lateral-load resistance. This was seen as an obsolete form of concrete design for much of the twentieth century, but exterior and partially-exterior concrete shear walls have made a comeback, which makes this building seem more modern. Its peer loft/office buildings were steel-framed with masonry facades, and the world was not yet ready for a brutalist high-rise in 1907, so the concrete walls are decorated in much the same manner that masonry walls would be:
The ornament (for example, the big window surround) was molded in reverse in plaster, and the plaster then placed inside the concrete forms, so the ornament is quite solidly part of the wall. Not what we’d do today – usually – but interesting.
You must be logged in to post a comment.