The first true skyscraper

The Home Insurance Building, recognised as the first skyscraper.

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It wasn’t until kit and tech combined that the first high-rises were possible or desirable.

We’ve devoted a lot of space recently to the opening of the Burj Khalifa and the machines that made it possible. However, there was once a time when it was impractical to build higher than a few floors. For one thing, walking up the stairs gets old really fast if your office is on the fourth floor or higher.

This was solved in part when a chap named Otis developed a lift that wouldn’t drop to the floor if something went wrong.

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The system was first demonstrated at the great exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851, though it was another ten years or so before elevators of this type were used. Originally, such ‘lifts’ were powered by steam, and later winched by electricity.

However, it was a development of another kind that brought in the age of the skyscraper, in the city of Chicago in 1885.

An architect named William LeBarron Jenney, who had recently graduated from a Parisienne architecture school named l’École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures where he, along with classmate Gustave Eiffel learned about the use of modern steel for building structures.

There was nothing particularly new in using steel beams in construction, though only in low-rise barn-like structures.

The idea of building something from the ground up around a steel ‘skeleton’ sounds so obvious today, but in the Victorian period the concept was the most radical form of architecture, bordering on the heretical in the eyes of some people.

So, it raised more than a few eyebrows when Jenney proposed a mighty ‘skyscraper’ which would tower above the Chicago skyline for his client the Home Insurance Company.

Built on granite piers, the radical new design would have a ground loading of less than a third than an all masonry building, and had walls that were far slimmer.

The structure was so outragous, the city authorities didn’t believe that it would stand up, and construction was actually stopped for a period.

However, stand up it did, and at ten stories high the building towered over the rest of the Chicago skyline. Hoisting the steels into place anso required some advanced tech, and it took some early steam cranes with wire rope to keep the project on track.

The Home Insurance building brought in the modern age of construction. By the end of the ninteenth century most new city buildings were built using the steel framed method.

Even the built environment doesn’t last forever though. In the year that Jenney designed the HIB, on the other side of the world another pioneer named Karl Benz was conducting his first experiments with a gasoline engine mounted on a tricycle.

By 1931 cars and trucks filled every city street in the world and the trike was obsolete, as was the Home Insurance Building. It was torn down for its replacement, a much more efficient 45 floor air-conditioned art deco-style building. Buildings, like heavy machinery it seems, follow an ever upward path.