WILLIAM VAN ALEN [1883–1954]

1. WILLIAM VAN ALEN [1883–1954] The Chrysler Building, 1926–1930

2. The Chrysler Building could only have been constructed in the competitive climate of Manhattan in the 1920s. • The American economy was flourishing, andthere was not enough office space to go around; urban builders were encouraged to aim high.

5. In 1926, Walter P. Chrysler, one of the wealthiest men in the automotive industry, entered his bid in the unofficial competition to build the tallest structure in New York City. • He wanted an office building exalted enough to symbolize his own astounding ascent in the business world.

6. Walter P. Chrysler

7. Walter P. Chrysler Times' Man of the Year 1928

8. Brooklyn-born architect William Van Alen, who had a reputation for progressive, flamboyant design, met Chrysler’s challenge with a seventy-seven-story building, the first in the world to exceed a height of one thousand feet.

9. The pyramidal form of the Chrysler Building was dictated by a 1916 zoning ordinance requiring buildings to be stepped back as they rose to allow sunlight and more air to reach the streets below. • This restriction allowed architects to take a more sculptural approach to urban design.

10. Instead of the tall, bland, rectangular boxes that had begun to colonize the city, inventive and dynamic forms began to lend interest and variety to the Manhattan skyline. • The ordinance also focused attention on the summit of a building.

11. The Chrysler Building (1930) surpassed the Eiffel Tower to become the world's tallest structure. • Almost as important, the Chrysler Building, with its jazzy, Art Deco lines and curves, announced to the world that Midtown Manhattan had arrived.

12. Today it represents the finest of the Art Deco style and indeed is probably the most beautiful Art Deco building in the world. 

13. The skyscraper no longer imitated gothic architecture (more common in Downtown Manhattan), but incorporated a current architecture style appropriate for its time of design and construction. • As if mocking the ancient gothic style of other skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building incorporates gargoyles and decorative top that ends in a spire reaching towards the sky.

14. The building is 77 stories  and the height to the top of its spire is 1048 feet.  • The tower culminates in a beautiful, tapered stainless steel crown that supports the famous spire at its peak. 

15. The  building has a lot of ornamentation that is based on features that were being used on Chrysler cars of the day.

19. Atop the Chrysler, seven overlapping arches diminish toward the top to create the illusion of a building even taller than it is.

22. The distinctive decoration, a pattern of narrow triangles set in semicircles, has been likened to a sunburst, but it might equally recall the spokes of a wheel.

23. Van Alen’s signal contribution to American architecture was to apply to modern skyscrapers the visual vocabulary of Art Deco, an international decorative style that emphasized streamlined motifs and often employed nontraditional materials.

24. To make the Chrysler Building distinct from others of its kind, Van Alen chose motifs appropriate to the machine age, particularly the automobile.

25. Notice, the gargoyles are actually Chrysler hood ornaments, and the decorative top is basically a series of hubcap-like curves.

26. The spire’s gleaming stainless steel cladding calls to mind the polished chrome of a brand new car. • Stylized American eagle heads protrude from some corners of the building in playful reference to the gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals.

28. Other corners are embellished with the winged forms of a Chrysler radiator cap. One ornamental frieze incorporates a band of hubcaps.

29. The corners of the sixty first  floor are graced with eagles, replicas of the 1929 Chrysler hood ornaments.

31. The building might as well be a car, definitely an object worthy of a cathedral like building in modern day America. 

33. On the thirty first floor, the corner ornamentations are replicas of 1929 Chrysler radiator caps.

35. The building is steel frame,  masonry construction,  and metal cladding. • There are  3,862 windows on its facade and 4 banks of 8 elevators designed by Otis Elevator Corporation.     • As of this writing, it is still the 3rd tallest building in New York City. 

36. If the exterior ornament enhances the modernity of the skyscraper, the interior was designed to recall the distant past, and positions the Chrysler Building among the wonders of the world.

37. Chrysler Building, Entry Way Details 

38. The most spectacular features of the grand lobby are the elevator doors, adorned in brass and marquetry (decorative inlays on a wood base) with the lotus flower motif.

40. Elevator Doors

41. Inside a Chrysler Building elevator, looking up

42. The discovery in 1922 of King Tutankhamen’s tomb had unleashed an enthusiasm for archaic and exotic cultures, and the Chrysler Building was designed at the height of this mania for all things Egyptian.

43. In addition to the lotus decoration, the public rooms display a range of ancient Egyptian motifs intended to suggest the building’s association with the great pyramids of the pharaohs.

46. Art Deco Painted Ceilings

47. The paintings on the lobby ceiling record the heroic progress of the tower’s construction, as if the monument to Chrysler had already assumed a place in history equal to that of the Great Pyramids.

49. Both Chrysler and Van Alen were intent upon making this building the tallest in the city, but toward the end of construction there was uncertainty over whether it could indeed hold that distinction.

50. A rapidly rising office tower in Lower Manhattan had already reached 840 feet, and its architect, Van Alen’s former business partner, who acknowledged competition from the Chrysler, pushed his building even higher by adding a sixty-foot steel cap.