In the U.S., Skyscrapers Are Being Downsized by History
The American skyscraper, which has reigned over urban skylines for more than a century, has fallen out of favor in recent years as a towering symbol of civic pride and corporate ego.
Skyscraper construction has virtually dried up because of the overbuilding of the 1980s and the national recession in the early 1990s. And the future doesn’t look very bright, either.
The need for tall downtown offices in the years ahead will be severely limited by tighter corporate purse strings, computer and telecommunications advances, and the continued march of businesses to the suburbs, experts say.
“It is an Industrial Age product,” said Barry Liebert, a real estate and technology consultant in Boston. “Their day has come and gone.”
Since 1990, ground has been broken for only 20 skyscrapers--most of them conceived in the 1980s--according to F. W. Dodge, the construction research arm of McGraw Hill. (Modern skyscrapers are generally defined as buildings 30 stories or higher.)
By contrast, nine times that many skyscrapers were begun between 1980 and 1986, and nearly 250 were built during the entire decade.
“We are going to close out the 20th century with very few [skyscrapers] being built,” said Carolyn Hull, an economist for F. W. Dodge.
Large corporate tenants--whose executives competed fiercely for the prized corner office with the panoramic view--have abandoned their high-rise homes by the score in recent years.
Sears, Roebuck & Co., for example, left behind its landmark 110-story Chicago headquarters--the tallest building in America--three years ago for a more efficient suburban complex with buildings no taller than six floors.
In Los Angeles, known for its sprawl more than its skyline, the last skyscraper-class building--the 52-story Two California Plaza downtown--was completed in 1992, but it quickly ran into financial problems due to scarce tenants and falling rents. It recently changed hands at about one-third its estimated $300-million cost.
Cities nationwide face growing inventories of nearly empty towers. In New York, the city and private interests are trying to rescue many pre-Depression skyscrapers by converting them into apartments and condominiums. One audacious proposal urged the city of Detroit to create a park--an “American acropolis”--out of its derelict downtown skyscrapers.
The recovery of many domestic commercial real estate markets and the egos of a few business executives mean that skyscraper construction is not about to come to a halt.
New York real estate developer Donald Trump, who once proposed a 150-story tower for Los Angeles but never built it, recently touted a proposal to move the New York Stock Exchange into what would be the world’s tallest building. However, plans to build the 1,792-foot-tower were greeted with considerable skepticism when they were first announced in August, and they suffered a major blow recently when the NYSE announced its intention to stay put in its historic home.
But, certainly, these kinds of monuments will be far less common in the years ahead, most real estate and design experts believe. The skyscraper of the future, they say, will be more modest and rely on combining offices with homes, hotels, entertainment centers and stores under one lofty roof.
Beginning With Ashes
The era of the skyscraper began more than a century ago in Chicago, where, in the ashes of the great fire of 1871, architects, engineers and businessmen began experimenting with a new building form.
The invention of a reliable passenger elevator, plus the refinement of steel-frame and concrete construction, resulted in the tall fireproof buildings. The first known skyscraper, the 180-foot-high Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was constructed in 1884-85. (It has since been demolished.)
By the turn of the century, skyscrapers began to eclipse the church steeples and town halls that had long dominated the nation’s cityscapes. Chicago and New York were locked in a race to build the tallest building. Legendary Chicago architect Louis Sullivan emerged as a visionary, creating elegant and powerful designs for the new office buildings that are still held up as models of commercial architecture.
However, the skyscraper has never been universally welcomed. After 1900, cities began adopting zoning laws in response to public outcry about overcrowding and the enormous shadows associated with the new skyscrapers. Many of the same criticisms are still leveled at the mammoth buildings, which have been reviled by critics as overpowering phallic symbols of arrogance and greed.
“There has always been enormous opposition to skyscrapers,” said USC architectural historian Diane Ghirardo. “It was always a way of exploiting a piece of land by going higher. It was always a way to make a lot more money.”
Despite opposition, skyscrapers have long been embraced by business as symbols of success and stature.
When the now-defunct First Interstate Corp. moved its headquarters from the second-highest tower in Los Angeles to the tallest--the 72-story First Interstate World Center--the bank was motivated by the image and marketing benefits of occupying the tallest building in the West.
Houston developer Gerald D. Hines was in a league of his own with a collection of dress-for-success skyscrapers that captured the excesses of corporate America during the manic 1980s.
“We created some fabulous buildings,” said Hines executive Jim Buie, alluding to the Gothic-like spires and wedding-cake-shaped towers that Hines built across the nation--about 60 in all. “In the ‘80s, skyscrapers reached a zenith in terms of making a powerful statement.”
Corporate ego has long played a role in the building of the tallest and most impressive skyscrapers, said New York architect Eugene Kohn, whose sleek towers dot skylines worldwide. “But today, that’s not so much the case. No one wants to take a big risk.”
Instead of building up, today corporate America prefers to spread out.
In Toledo, Ohio, glass and building products manufacturer Owens Corning recently finished moving out of a 28-floor high-rise and onto a 20-acre corporate campus. Most of its 1,000 employees will occupy a crescent-shaped, three-story building that hugs a bend in the Maumee River.
Inside, a layout that features more informal meeting areas and far fewer enclosed offices than the high-rise is designed to foster collaboration and the sharing of ideas among workers and departments.
“We see the new building as a reflection of the changes in [our] organizational approach and philosophy. . . . It’s flatter, leaner,” said company spokesman Bill Hamilton of the $100-million complex. “Executives will be in the middle floor in the heart of the organization.”
After large layoffs, the smaller corporate staffs of today mean fewer potential tenants to fill a prominent new skyscraper.
For example, Alcoa, the giant Pittsburgh-based maker of aluminum products, built a 31-story skyscraper in 1950 when its corporate staff numbered 1,500. Today, the company has half as many workers in the same building and plans to relocate only about 400 of them to its new four-story headquarters, while the others will be sent to a variety of locations.
More and more, companies “do not want the corporate staff sitting in an elaborate tower sending messages telling people what to do,” said Franklin Becker, who heads the workplace studies program at Cornell University and is advising Alcoa on its new offices.
Skyscrapers are also on the losing side of the competition between downtowns and suburbs. While the suburbs have been emerging as business centers for decades, their growth took off during the booming 1980s. As a result, the suburbs now claim more office space than central cities.
Greater Informality
Most skyscrapers lack the huge, warehouse-like spaces now favored by many business tenants. These vast floors are easy to adapt to increases--as well as cuts--in staff and make it more likely that an entire department can be put in one location. Such arrangements are regarded as more conducive to face-to-face contact among co-workers than a high-rise, where staffs often occupy several floors.
“There is a much greater need for people to communicate on an informal basis rather than have the corporation stacked and compartmentalized,” said Kent Spreckelmeyer, chairman of the architecture department at the University of Kansas. “The whole notion of [a vertical office building] becomes kind of a negative.”
Replete with jogging trails, volleyball courts and even simulated prairie land, the suburban office parks reflect the more casual, egalitarian atmosphere now in vogue at many companies.
“You can slide open a window, walk out on a balcony and have a cup of coffee. . . . It’s a lifestyle that we like,” said Timothy Walker, whose development company, Los Angeles-based Maguire Thomas Partners, has shifted its focus from downtown skyscrapers to suburban offices. “It would be hard to put a tennis court in a downtown L.A. [high-rise].”
Many of the nation’s fastest-growing companies--such as high-technology and entertainment firms--that gobble up office space are found mostly in low-rise, suburban settings. When it came to building a new home, Creative Arts, a Bay Area computer software firm, never even considered a high-rise for its army of writers, artists and computer programmers.
“What they want is bungalows. They want seclusion,” said Jim Healy, vice president of operations for Redwood City-based Creative Arts, which makes entertainment software for computer games and other products.
Creative Arts and its architects are designing a low-rise compound of buildings grouped around a giant lawn about the length of two football fields. Flagpoles will rise higher than some buildings, which will feature outdoor meeting areas and work spaces.
Employees “will have the ability to go outside without having to go down a 36-floor elevator ride,” Healy said.
A Growing Threat
Technology, meanwhile, poses another growing threat to the skyscraper. Online legal archives and research services have freed many law firms to cut back on space devoted to law libraries. Companies have saved space by putting traveling salespeople, auditors and consultants in virtual offices composed of laptop computers, high-speed modems and cellular telephones.
Sean Hoffman, a 29-year-old financial consultant, lost his office in a 41-story downtown Los Angeles skyscraper when his employer, KPMG Peat Marwick, eliminated permanent offices for about 100 workers at the site, allowing it in part to eliminate 1 1/2 floors of space.
When Hoffman needs to work downtown, he calls ahead to reserve an office. Otherwise, he works from clients’ offices or from home and relies on a laptop computer that he can use to send and receive faxes as well as connect with the firm’s internal computer system.
“I really thought it was impressive to have an office downtown,” said Hoffman. But now, “I love having the technology at my fingertips.”
The dearth of domestic activity has forced many U.S. designers and developers to pack up their drawing boards and head for Asia. Kohn, the New York architect, has designed a 1,500-foot-high skyscraper for Shanghai that may eventually steal away the title of world’s tallest building from Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, which were designed by another U.S. architect, Cesar Pelli.
Hines’ development company--Gerald D. Hines Interests--is also busy pursuing Asian skyscraper projects from Manila to Seoul, said Buie. The company’s potential projects include a high-rise for Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
“We are a mature economy. We are a mature culture,” said Bouie.
“Asia,” by contrast, “is a whole different set of opportunities. We are very excited.”
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Peaked Out
The construction of skyscrapers in the U.S. has slowed drastically in recent years after booming in the 1980s.
Year starting construction
‘81: 41
‘87: 28
‘96*: 1
Source: F.W. Dodge / McGraw Hill
* Year-to-date figure
