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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate expert, 1904

In the first half of the twentieth century, Western artistic culture was transformed by a complex family of movements that we call modernism, a trend that extends far beyond architecture into the literature of Joyce and Pound, the painting of Picasso and Matisse, and the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. We see the arrangement of shapes the architects refer to as the massing, the heart-stopping shimmer in the reflections of the clouds as the wind sucks at the black glass of the windows, the checkerboards of granite on the lobby floor, and to us that is the self-evident end and purpose of all that vast labor. More generally, developers may or may not have strong aesthetic preferences (some care deeply, some not at all), but either way they tend to exercise a firm hand in the design process, putting money where it's useful and cutting it out where its not, and will often be very opinionated about what will work for a given project, based on the market and what tenants are believed to want.

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