Iron Work

Irving Underhill, April 4, 1912, “Woolworth Bldg. iron work”:

This photo was taken about a month and a half after the photo I put up two weeks ago, and things were moving quickly. The frame was going up, the typical-floor terra cotta facade was going up, and the windows (the scaffold six floors down from the top of the terra cotta construction) were being installed.

If you’re in the field, the phrase “typical floor” has a specific meaning and feeling; if not, I think this picture helps bring home how repetitive the floors of even an ornate skyscraper can be.

We see bay after bay, floor after floor of identical (or nearly so) steel beams and columns, steel connections, terra cotta veneer blocks, and back-up brick masonry. The individual masonry piers have complex geometry, and the floor framing is adapted to the not-quite right angles of the street layout and the need to properly brace both the bays that will continue up into the tower and those that end halfway up, but seen from a distance, the details fade into an expression of three-dimensional cartesian coordinates. After all, office space is rented by the square foot, not by the ornate geometrical figure.