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(More customer reviews)When my wife and I lived near Chicago, we took several architectural walking tours. Since then, we have repeated the experience in at least two more cities, San Francisco and Houston. But never - until now, vicariously - had we taken such a tour of New York.
Dirk Stichweh's New York Skyscrapers may resemble a coffee table book - it's oversized and handsomely produced - but it's a work of substance. I have visited New York countless times but somehow never looked, and I mean looked, at its buildings. And many are jewels, as the photographs by Jörg Machirus and Scott Murphy prove.
In its introduction New York Skyscrapers retells the history of these urban upthrusts. Rooted in Chicago, almost all manmade (female architects were as rare as female construction workers), they each have dynamic stories to tell. They also have a psychology behind them. The race to construct the tallest building in the city, the country, or the world, speaks to America's can-do spirit and lofty aspirations as well as its long love affair with power and its display.
Stichweh organizes the book - generally with two pages devoted to each building - by neighborhood, moving from the Financial District (haunted by the destruction of the World Trade Center) to the Theater District. The descriptions are cogent yet lengthy enough to give the reader the flavor of each building. In addition, the author provides information about the architects, the designs, the contexts, and the receptions of most buildings.
In reading, I found the boxy buildings of the late 1960s were (for me) no more palatable here than in a dozen other cities I have visited. In contrast, even more entrancing than I imagined were those buildings influenced by the Beaux Arts movement and Art Deco. (A useful Glossary and Index of Proper Names ends the book.)
Stichweh's excellent biblio-walking tour whet my appetite for the real thing. How I now long to see, in person, the American Radiator Building. Resembling something out of a mythical Gotham, it is at once disturbing in its severity, imposing in its black-brick cladding, fanciful in its use of color and materials, and, yes, finally, beautiful. Jörg Machirus's photograph of it at night makes it even more so. Visiting New York? I recommend the Statue of Liberty, the Top of the Rock, TKTS, and the American Radiator.
My list of spectacular buildings could go on and on. Meanwhile, the contribution that photographs make to New York Skyscrapers is enormous. These are not mere snapshots of skyscrapers: they are themselves, many of them, works of beauty if not art. Scott Murphy's portraits of the Empire State and the Chrysler Buildings at evening capture their majesty and their classic grace. Even more arresting is his aerial photograph of the crown of the General Electric Building. As in several of his other aerials, the building - and the moment - seem alive, as if we were floating by this magnificent edifice.
Anyone who loves New York, loves architecture, loves history, and loves American culture should visit and study the buildings pictured herein. For the rest of us, without the capital or time to travel, this book is an indispensable treasure.
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New York City is home to more skyscrapers than any other city in the world. Iconic in stature, they tell the story of the city's commercial and architectural history. The buildings pictured here stretch from the sidewalks to the sky, from the East River to the Hudson, from Battery Park to the far reaches of Central Park. Along with structures that are familiar to readers such as the Empire State Building, the Chrysler and Woolworth buildings, there are other less recognizable but nonetheless important structures that have become a part of New Yorkers'daily lives. Each chapter focuses on an area of Manhattan, and opens with numbered maps showing the exact locations of the featured buildings. In a series of two to four page spreads, fullpage photographs of the skyscrapers are accompanied by additional illustrations, historical insights, architectural details, and interesting facts about their construction and evolution. An essay on the collective history of the city's skyscrapers rounds out this compilation of nearly 85 examples of New York City's most magnificent feature-its far-reaching, ever changing skyline.
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