Page 20 - Reside Magazine Premier Central Florida

Previous page: Jeanne Gang’s
Aqua Tower in Chicago mirrors
the hills, valleys, and lakes of
a natural landscape.
Left: Chicago’s Home Insurance
Building, built in 1885, was
the first tower to use a metal
structure to support its
masonry, enabling a narrower
but taller design.
Below right: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa
is the currently the world’s tallest
building at more than 828m

T he word “skyscraper” first emerged in Chicago in the late 19th
century, a natural expression of people’s awe at the newly tall
buildings scraping away a piece of sky from their vision, casting
shadows onto sidewalks, and blocking out the sun. It altered
their experience of the city. Skyscrapers still have that effect
today, perhaps on an even more visceral scale: the gust of a wind
tunnel, the speed of an elevator, the breathtaking sight of a skyline at sunset.
While US architect William Le Baron Jenney’s 10-story Home Insurance
Building of 1885 in Chicago is widely considered to be the first true example
of the form, it is his contemporary, Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) who was labeled
“the father of skyscrapers” for his influential theories of design and construction
that enabled these buildings to reach new heights. In the centenary of Sullivan’s
death, it feels timely to reflect on the skyscraper’s ever-expanding appeal.
The past century has seen it rise from the ornate brick and steel office
buildings of the late 1880s, all the way to the current tallest, the 828m Burj
Khalifa, completed in Dubai in 2010: a colossal slither of glass, concrete, and
metal. Styles have shape-shifted in between, from the decorative art deco

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