The City-Within-a-City and Skyscraper Patronage in the 1920's

Abstract

Previously overlooked or ideologically dismissed by historians, the histories of four Midwestern skyscraper cities-within-cities designed and built between 1919 and 1931 constitute for several reasons an important chapter in the architectural and cultural history of the skyscraper. Certain characteristics of the developers for the four complexes link them to other skyscraper patrons in New York and Chicago, establishing the basis for a comprehensive typology of skyscraper patronage in the 1920's. Moreover, each developer in his own way lived out aspects of the American myth of the self-made man, a social type of distinct popular appeal throughout this decade. Each developer as self-made man combined the values of a disappearing frontier and agrarian past with those of a newly urban, technological and bureaucratic America. This conflation of tradition and modernity was essential to both the design and meaning of the skyscraper cities-within-cities.

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Edward W. Wolner

Edward W. Wolner is an architectural historian teaching in the Department of Architecture at Ball State University, Indiana. He received his PhD from New York University, where he also taught, and he subsequently taught at Brooklyn College and at the Ohio State University.