Traveling in Style : PLACES OF THE HEART : Manhattan : Rhapsody in Deco : Think Gershwin When Contemplating the Chrysler Building: Complex Rhythms, Monumental Chords, a Certain Lightness

For travelers landing at JFK and LaGuardia airports, two Manhattan skyscrapers in the great asparagus patch along the East River capture the New Yorkness of New York: the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. In the middle of the panorama, lithe and pointed, they are a natural pair, the male and female of their species, and with their aspiring shapes and regal bearing, they epitomize the elegance and energy of Manhattan’s delirium.

But their overlapped history has over the years constituted a tale of architectural sexism, with the 102-story Empire State commanding the overwhelming share of attention--whether in the form of King Kong and Fay Wray or lightning bolts, which seem to prefer the taller of the two structures. The Empire State has long been the trophy destination for visitors, worthy of a charm on a bracelet or a kitschy ashtray, while the Chrysler has remained a monument noted more simply with pleasure in passing. If the Empire State persists as a perennial tourist mecca, the Chrysler has vanished from many travel itineraries and retreated from any public role. Its observation deck closed to the public about four decades ago, and the once-famous Cloud Club, for the captains of New York industry, extinguished its Art Deco sconces almost 20 years ago.

Yellow school buses line up on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue for the Empire State Building, but only the occasional walking tour organized by the Art Deco Society or the Municipal Art Society makes it to the corner of 42nd and Lexington for the Chrysler. The graceful structure belongs, for the most part, to the New York business day, to Japanese travelers and architecture students bearing tripods and to the few who have heard about its lush and historic lobby.

It is a building to which I often return, sometimes just for moments of quiet, as a European might drop into a favorite neighborhood cathedral. The lobby, just feet away from one of Manhattan’s busiest traffic and subway intersections, is almost religiously serene, with a remarkable tone emanating from the muted colors in the paints and marbles. No matter how many times one visits, new subtleties within all the complexity emerge, along with a sense of wonder at the brilliantly orchestrated architectural spectacle.

Think Gershwin when contemplating Chrysler: complex rhythms, monumental chords, unexpected quips, a certain lightness. It is one of the most unexpected and daring modern structures ever built in New York, as outrageous a concoction on the outside as any Carmen Miranda hat but technically advanced enough to be taller than the Eiffel Tower. It was built in little more than a year. Its architect, William Van Alen, once came to a costume ball dressed as the building, complete with the crown, and the photograph lives in the annals of fashion and architecture history. Even as haberdashery, the design was unprecedented.

It is, first of all, one of those big-hearted buildings that is generous at all scales, with something to offer both miles away and up close. Travelers first spot its hypodermic silhouette from the highways looping into the city. But the most telling view is along the Lexington Avenue corridor from Gramercy Park; seen from 30 blocks away, in the context of its surrounding boxy, bread-and-butter buildings, it is tall, slender and aristocratic in its shining tiara. The Chrysler may be a symbol of the excessive, roaring ‘20s, but it is also an incarnation of that period’s elegance and originality--decadent, perhaps, but unrepentantly ready for the party. It has the detail of a much smaller structure, and it clearly engaged the architect down to the light bulbs.

For a few months in 1930 (until the Empire State Building was completed), the Chrysler was the tallest structure in the world. The race for height had driven many designs of the 1920s and 1930s, and Van Alen, working for auto magnate Walter P. Chrysler, won the title for that brief time by dramatically ushering up a secret 123-foot stainless-steel spire through the building’s crown. Then, as now, height generated publicity for a building.

The Chrysler also attracted attention with a rollicking decorating program worthy of Ziegfeld. A long frieze of automobile tires on the 30th floor, outlined in gray brick against white, rolls to corners shaped as giant, winged hubcaps. On the 59th floor, great eagle gargoyles (which were photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, who maintained offices in the building) project from the corners like De Soto hood ornaments. And then there is the spectacular headdress, sheathed in a new, rust-resistant metal alloy that in the sunlight became a beacon and, in newspapers, a lightning rod for attention. The design worked as both a sundial and press release. The Chrysler was very much the product of the new Advertising Age, intended as much to be read as copy as to be seen on its Manhattan corner.

If the 77-story Chrysler Building was not tall enough to reign by statistics for long, the drop-dead design that drew such attention in 1930 ironically hastened the neglect. Critics in the newly Calvinist 1930s punished the building for its head-to-toe decoration. The eminent architecture critic Lewis Mumford derided the Chrysler for its “inane romanticism, meaningless voluptuousness, void symbolism,” and for decades, despite its popularity as the flamboyant showgirl of the city, purists among architects did not let themselves like this painted creature. Decoration was, after all, a sin, and in the case of the Chrysler, all the more sinful because excessive; the architect, they said, had failed to integrate decoration into structure in a meaningful way.

Perhaps those who disapproved of the design were deceived by that automobile-inspired decoration, which distracted from the more fascinating and fundamental concerns of the design: the building as an instrument and metaphor of light and energy.

Electricity was only several decades old, and Art Deco designers were among the first to realize the challenge was to design and shape light rather than object. In many buildings of the 1920s, they created complex chandeliers and sconces with patterns of light more remarkable than the fixtures themselves. But if designing artificial light was possible, it might also be feasible to design natural light: The design challenge was not so much a beguiling shape for the crown, but the crown as a reflector that would constantly engage and intensify the sun. Light in architecture, as in literature, has often symbolized epiphany, and a building designed to incandesce would symbolize progress in the new promised land of the machine, the shining city. Because of its patron, the Chrysler building was obligated, more than most, to embody the Machine Age and its promise to deliver mankind from toil.

But how, after all, to make a building glow? Since the path of the sun in the sky is orbital, Van Alen faced each of the crown’s four sides in a succession of stepped arches whose circularity caught the sun. Light glints off the radiating semicircles, the successive rings tracking the sun’s course like a monumental dial, blazing at midday.

MANY BUILDINGS WITH APPEAL at a distance seem to retreat up close, without detail to sustain interest: no there there. But the Chrysler, so charismatic from afar, also captivates at close range. From the street, the white-on-white basket weave in the brick facade emerges subtly--the Chrysler is one of the few high-rises designed along its entire length, not just at bottom and top. At the sidewalk, discs of mica in the black-granite walls flicker as one passes, beckoning one into the lobby, which is a colorist’s masterpiece of exotic marbles and woods. A closed and luminous world, the lobby features patterns of natural materials. Bookended panels of flaming red Moroccan marble line the walls, but the marble is not merely lavish: Van Alen juxtaposed three varying widths and three varieties, each with different grains: One strip has circus patterns, another undulating white streams and the third a crackling visual buzz like radio static. Overhead, in rich sepia tones, muralist Edward Trumbull painted a 97-by-110-foot allegorical panorama--”Energy, Result, Workmanship and Transportation”--depicting the works of man made with the help of energy and the machine. It is one of the great epic murals in New York but is little noticed during the workaday week. A small section with swirling lines amid a storm of particles depicts invisible forces--a key drawing that explains themes throughout the building. Workmen in overalls and caps wield tools, while single-engine planes buzz overhead--man is reaching no less than the sky with his machines.

The light inside, as outside, is hypnotic. Long, tubular fixtures, arranged like the pipes of a magisterial organ in a church, face walls of translucent Mexican onyx, and the onyx emits an otherworldly glow. The treatment renews and updates the tradition of natural light filtering through the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals.

The elevator doors summarize visual themes of the building--the fanning shapes and triangular windows form the crown--and display them in veneered panels of exotic wood that recall, and probably even outdo, the Heavenly Gates. They are what St. Peter might have done had he had the money, the architect and the need for a lift. They open to reveal more exotic woods in an elevator cab whose speed in 1930 exceeded lawful limits.

Those with appointments in the Chrysler Building will be rewarded upstairs with a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline with but one major flaw: The Chrysler Building is missing.

GUIDEBOOK: The Chrysler Building

The Chrysler Building is located at 405 Lexington Ave., N.Y., (212) 682-3070. Since it is a private office building, visitors are allowed access to the street-level Art Deco lobby only. Hours are 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. Weekend access is restricted.

The lobby of the Chrysler Building is included on 42nd Street walking tours scheduled several times a year by the Art Deco Society of New York. The cost is $10 per person. Telephone (212) 385-2744. Special tours can also be prearranged for groups.