The Woolworth Building

Judged on purpose, structure and site. Much is compelled. The base takes the lot and the light court brings daylight into deep office floors, the rule of rentable space. The tower stands on the Broadway front, where it faces the park and is seen whole, the only place on the lot it could stand. The piers that run unbroken up the shaft are the frame made visible, not applied. What resists the subtractive test is the rest of the Gothic: the tracery, crockets, pinnacles and gargoyles could be shaved off and the offices would work as before. The height above the base answers no office need; Woolworth wanted to pass the Metropolitan Life tower, and the upper floors are small. The defence is that the purpose was an image, and the image is one figure.

Score: 7.7 / 10

What can be stated, and holds: by 1913 the highest point of the greatest American city belonged to retail commerce, and a fortune made of small coins could build the tallest structure in the world without a mortgage. The building puts that in the form where Christendom put its highest claim, and makes the claim legible: a tower that is a spire, a lobby that is a nave. It knows what it is doing, in the corbel of Woolworth counting coins inside his own cathedral. The disclosure is first made here, not repeated. It stands below the bar because it is borne mainly by the costume, which can be read as homage as easily as unmasking: the building celebrates more than it reveals, and much of what it gives is a mood of civic and commercial confidence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height is high and recurs, outside and in. Outside: the tower seen across City Hall Park, the cream piers drawing the eye up without a break to the copper crown; the shaft at dusk and floodlit at night; the building seen from the harbour and from Brooklyn Bridge, for decades the summit of the skyline. Inside, the lobby is a real elevation, not a jewel box: vaults gold with mosaic, veined marble, light falling from the glass ceiling, the scale of a church aisle given to a public passage. A sublime top and a sublime threshold together lift the axis. What holds it: the office floors are offices; the upper tower is private and the lobby reached by tour; and the elevation is grandeur in a borrowed manner, within the register Gothic had already proved.

Score: 8.6 / 10

More is built here than evoked. The cathedral is not only ornament: the lobby is laid out on a cross, its arms vaulted, its crossing lit from above; the tower is set where a spire stands, over the entrance on the main front, and rises to a pointed crown. The ascent is structure, the piers carrying the eye straight up. And the particular is kept: this corner, this park, this fortune of small coins. What holds the axis below the bar is that the archetype is borrowed and turned, the church taken for commerce, so that the deep pattern serves as a sign of what has displaced it rather than being lived in its own right; and the carved grotesques evoke rather than build. The myth built most fully is that of American commerce at its height, an age’s myth more than the race’s.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance: the tall office building in historical costume, Beaux-Arts or Gothic; Sullivan’s argument that the tall building should be proud and soaring and express its vertical frame; Gilbert’s own Gothic West Street Building of 1907, a few blocks away; and the towers of the Singer and Metropolitan Life buildings just before it. The departure: Gothic verticality carried the whole height of the tallest building in the world, the piers unbroken from the base to the crown, the skin a pale glazed terra cotta coloured at the top so that the ornament reads from below. The stake was real, Woolworth’s own money and a height never built before. But Gothic on a steel tower, and a tower on a base, were proven in New York before 1910. A wager on a proven path, at an unproven scale.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Would a different form change what the building knows? The arrival would change: the arcade lobby makes entry a passage through a nave, and those who work in the building cross a sacred plan to reach their desks. The form changed how a company and a city are seen, the name of a chain store become a figure on the skyline. But office work inside was lived as in any tower of the period, on floors round a core, by windows set between piers; give the shaft a classical costume and the offices lose nothing. The base and light court are the common pattern of the speculative block. What the form knows is the image of the enterprise and the ceremony of entry, which is much for its fame and less for its use. It clears the floor with room, and the Universal Minimum by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: 113 years of return. The building has yielded to critics from its first years, Montgomery Schuyler among them, writing at length; to the modernist argument, as the very type of historicism over structure; then to historians who read its Gothic as the honest expression of the frame Sullivan asked for; to histories of the skyscraper as an instrument of corporate image and of the city; and to the debate over preservation that its failing skin forced in the 1970s. The questions stay open: costume or expression, cathedral or advertisement, the end of an eclectic tradition or the start of the skyscraper as sign. Held lower because once seen, the plan and section yield little more, and much of the return is the history around the building rather than knowledge drawn from it.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The intrinsic force: the skyscraper made a monument, the tall office building given the authority of the cathedral and its frame expressed in an unbroken vertical; the tallest structure in the world raised on a riveted frame braced against wind. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real and wide for two decades, bounded after. It held the height record for seventeen years and set the type of the Gothic skyscraper that followed, the Chicago Tribune Tower and the Gothic towers of the 1920s, the Cathedral of Learning, the collegiate and church Gothic of tall buildings across American cities. Then the setback towers of the late 1920s and the International Style cut off its line, and it became the modernists’ example of what not to do, a reach that is negative. In its field it is the summit and the model; as a turn in the art of building, it is narrower.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: base, tower, crown and lobby are Gilbert’s and in place, and the building has outlived the company that built it, the five-and-ten economy and the style it wore. Use survives in part: the lower floors are still offices, but the client left in 1998, the observation floor closed long ago, the upper tower is now private apartments, and the lobby, the building’s public room, has been open only by tour since 2001. Fabric is the largest charge: the terra cotta failed under weather and much of it was replaced in the restoration around 1980, so the skin one sees is in good part a replacement that keeps the form. A hundred and thirteen years with the form whole earns the figure; the changed use and the replaced skin keep it there.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing in the structure: a riveted frame carried to bedrock on caissons and braced against wind for a slender tower of unprecedented height, standing for more than a century; elevators running the full height; the building’s own mechanical plant. The skin is detailed with real intelligence: the ornament enlarged as it rises, the colour placed high so that the crown reads from the park, piers and spandrels set so that the vertical holds over 57 floors. The lobby is a work of crafts in command, in marble, mosaic, glass, carved wood and stone. The costs: the terra cotta failed within seventy years, a weakness of the material as used; the ornament is applied to the frame, not made by it; and the base, behind its front, is a plain speculative block.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the copper pinnacles of the crown, 792 feet up, and the corbel of Woolworth counting coins in the lobby. One law governs both: the vertical Gothic of the late medieval north, applied as a single system from the caisson to the lantern, the ornament scaled to distance and the piers running unbroken. Base and tower read as one because the piers run through both; the crown gathers the shaft and ends it. The range is wide, from structure to caricature, from the skyline to the arcade. What bends the law: the lobby’s vaults and mosaics are more Byzantine and Romanesque than Gothic, a second physics inside the first, close in spirit but not the same; and the back of the base, round the light court, falls to the plainer law of the rental block.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Orders held: commerce and the retail economy of small sums, which paid for it; labour and trade, figured in the corbels of the men who made it; the city, the building facing City Hall across the park, private power set opposite the civic; the sacred, as the form borrowed to dignify commerce; technology, in electricity, elevators and the frame; and one man’s ambition made public. Base, spire and nave hold these in one figure, so they are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only borrowed: the household, which came only lately, in the apartments, and not by design; the natural order; the sacred as more than costume; and death. An office tower holds an enterprise and a city at one moment, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.2 / 10