01 | 02 Š 2013 by Rockport Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is a student project and was not intended for selling purposes. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owners. All images in this book are protected by the artists. There is no responsibility that is accepted by producer, publisher, or printer for any infringement of copyright or otherwise, arising from the contents of this publication. Every effort has been made to ensure that credits accurately comply with information supplied.
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to my family and my loving boyfriend. Thank you for supporting me in pursuing my passion for design. With you, I wouldn’t be this driven to accomplish my dreams. T I T L E O F T H E B O O K | C O P Y R I G H T & D E D I C AT I O N
03 | 04
05
The Very Top
13
The Materials
20
Complications
30
The completion
40
Recognition
50
Bibliography
T I T L E O F T H E B O O K | TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
The Very Top
TITLE OF THE BOOK | CHAPTER 1
The spire of the Chrysler Building was built inside. It was kept a secret from all the other
CROWN ORNAMENTATION
07 | 08
architects as a surprise due to competition.
William Van Alen was an American architect, best known as the architect in charge of designing New York City’s Chrysler Building.
The Chrysler Building is a renowned building and is also recognized for its terraced crown. It is composed of seven radiating terraced arches. Architect, William Van Alen had designed the crown as a cruciform groin vault. It was then constructed into seven concentric members and with transitioning the set backs. It was then mounted up behind one another. The stainlesssteel cladding is ribbed and is riveted in an elegant and radiating sunburst pattern, with a wide-range of triangular vaulted windows. It transitions Television station WCBS-TV (Channel 2)
into much smaller segments
originally transmitted from the tip top of
of seven narrow setbacks in
the Chrysler in the 1940s and early 1950s,
the facade of the terraced
before moving to the Empire State Building.
crown. The entire part of the ornamental crown is made of clad, with silvery Enduro material was developed in G e r m a n y, b y K r u p p a n d marketed under the trade name Nirosta, meaning nonrusting steel. When the building was first opened in May 30 th 1930, it had a viewing gallery for the public in the 71 st floor. In 1945, it sadly closed to the public due to a new owner. A private club called Cloud Club occupied a three-floor, high rise space from the 66 th to the 68 th floor. Unfortunately, it closed in the late 1970s. This floor is now occupied as an office space for other renters in the building. It is not accessible by the public today.
T I T L E O F T H E B O O K | C R O W N O R N A M E N TAT I O N
KA-2 metal, a stainless steel
By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love. Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of tearth and hold the building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors. Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state’s prison for shooting another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.) On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster’s ease of life. Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.
Skyscraper, written by Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems.
The Materials
TITLE OF THE BOOK | CHAPTER 2
15 | 16
Stainless-steel is also a very versatile material. It can literally be used for years and remain stainless.
Austenitic is the most widely used type.
Stainless-steel is the universal
It has nickel content of about at least 7%,
name for a number of different
which makes it very flexible. It is used in
steels used primarily for their
industrial piping and vessels, constructional
anti-corrosive element. Stainless-
structures, and lastly, architecural facades.
steel has been developed to resist a number of corrosive workpaces are safe and that buildings last longer. It is also an earth friendly material; it can be melted down, recycled and made into something else. Stainless-steel is always made using chromium. The minimum amount of chromium used to make stainless steel is 10.5%; it is chromium that makes steel stainless. This is one of the many reasons why the foundation of the Chrysler Building still stands today.
T I T L E O F T H E B O O K | T H E M AT E R I A L S
environments. It ensures our
APPLIED MASONRY
17 | 18
Since the renovation, it has withstand the hardship of extreme weather conditions.
The lobby was refurbished and the facade
Applied masonry facade covers
was renovated from 1978 to 1979. At this time,
the structure of a building
the building was owned by Jack Kent Cook .
with a non-structural layer of discrete stones, bricks, blocks, or titles. A facade in which blocks or tiles joined by framework of the building. The Chrysler Building’s facade system is indeed, made out of applied masonry. Though it is applied masonry, the texture of the overall facade looks smooth and look very clean. It also goes well with the art deco/art moderne style of the Chrysler Building itself.
T I T L E O F T H E B O O K | T H E M AT E R I A L S
mortar cover the structural
50 | 51
Walter P. Chrysler
Stainless-Steel Eagles
CHAPTER
01
Nash, Eric Peter; McGrath, Norman (1999). Manhattan Skyscrapers. Princeton Architectural Press. 2013.
02
World’s Tallest Brick Building. SkyscraperPicture.com. 2013. The Chr ysler Building. T h e Skyscraper Source Media. SkyscraperPage.com. 2013. A View on Cities. Sights and attractions in some of the world’s greatest cities. 2013.
03
University of Wisconsin-Madison; School of Engineering. The Chrysler Building. Pierpont, Claudia Roth (Novemeber 18, 2002). The Silver Spire:
William Van Alen
How two men’s dreams changed the skyline of New York. 2011. A view from above. The Chrysler Building. 2010. 04
2005). “In a City of Skyscrapers, Which is the Mightiest of the High? Experts say it is No Contest.” April, 2009. PBS. The Wonders of the World, Databank. The Chrysler Building. 2000-2001.
RESOURCE
TITLE OF THE BOOK | BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dunlap, David W. (September 1,