Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Longer than that... the quarter-block office towers from the 1910s and 1920s with light courts were seen as pretty chunky too, especially compared to NYC's towers from that era which were less boxy and usually had more of a wedding cake form (Woolworth, etc).
When NYC did get a chonky Chicago-style tower - the Equitable Building, designed by a Chicago architect - everyone lost their sh*t and they reformed the zoning code to mandate wedding-cake design.
|
The 1800s actually. The foreign journalists back then often said, “Wow, those are some chonky office buildings.”
William Archer, America To-Day, 1900
Probably predates the skyscraper itself even. In the 1870s, there’s discussion of the unusual size and extent of the warehouses.
Sir John Leng, America in 1876, 1877