Towering Beauties

With the New York City skyline bereft of the World Trade Center towers, Americans have a renewed appreciation for the distinctive structures that symbolize the spirit of a city. Princeton Architectural Press taps into that sentiment with two richly designed photography books.

“The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon, Day by Day,” by David Stravitz ($45), due out this fall, presents more than 100 long-lost photographs documenting the 1928-1930 construction of the Art Deco skyscraper, briefly the world’s tallest building at 1,046 feet until the Empire State Building captured the honor in 1931. Stravitz, a photography aficionado, discovered a cache of historic negatives in a defunct photo studio days before they were to be recycled for their silver content. The dramatic images presented here showcase the optimism of the Chrysler’s machine age architecture against the backdrop of Depression-era Manhattan, from the marble-clad lobby to the exterior’s ornamental eagles and gargoyles resembling car parts.

“The Eiffel Tower” ($19.95), expected early next year, is a tribute to the most famous of Parisian landmarks. The haunting photos in the book span 50 years in the career of Lucien Herve, one of Europe’s most renowned architectural photographers. The once controversial tower was built for the International Exposition of Paris in 1889 to symbolize the science and engineering achievements of the time. (At 984 feet, it, too, reigned as the world’s tallest structure until the Chrysler Building was built.) Members of the city’s artistic elite found it an eyesore at the time, but the ethereal iron tower became an icon of the City of Light.