CHRYSLER BUILDING

Designed by William Van Alen, completed 1930 New York City
The Chrysler Building, designed by William Van Alen, stands 77 stories tall at
Lexington Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets in Manhattan, and is considered one of
the most famous and admired skyscrapers in the world. The Chrysler Building owes this
position primarily to its distinctive tower, which terminates in a series of curves that
support a final pointed spire. At night, v-shaped light patterns mark the successive curves,
keeping the structure conspicuous around the clock.
The building occupies an easily visible site, across the street from the Grand Central
Terminal, where subway lines, commuter rail lines, and long-distance rail lines converge.
Other buildings in the area attract less attention because their towers are rectilinear, and
thus commonplace. Not only does the Chrysler spire draw attention at close range as well
as from afar, but also the ground floor features tall, angular entrances, a lavishly
decorated lobby, and beautifully inlaid elevator cabs. Several setbacks along the
building’s silhouette have easily visible decorations including metal eagles, winged
radiator caps, and a brick frieze of Chrysler automobiles. The combination of stiff
stylization and recognizable imagery marks a phase of the style known as Art Deco, an
amalgam of French-inspired semi-abstraction and popular, easily intelligible subject
matter. The decorative forms at the Chrysler Building are more energetic than the more
classicizing ones used at the contemporary Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
All this came about when Walter Chrysler, Jr., a free spirit in his family of automobile
industrialists, obtained the building site and existing plans in 1928. Between 1925 and
1929, highrise office construction in New York City expanded markedly, and a site
convenient to public transportation was an ideal one for luring tenants in a highly
competitive market. There are entrances to the subway and terminal system within the
building, so that people could avoid walking outdoors to reach their workplaces.
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To design the project, Chrysler employed William Van Alen, a socially wellconnected
architect trained in the neoRenaissance tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts
who accommodated his work to the stylistic preferences of his clients. For Chrysler he
created a building that is seen as glamorous, amusing, and utilitarian all at once, although
it is rarely considered to exemplify serious high art. Neither architect nor client was
making a profound aesthetic or philosophical statement; the aim was pragmatic: to be
distinctive, as a good advertisement is. Van Alen was probably prodded by Chrysler to
design details in a more popular contemporary mode than was customary for this
architect.
The owner hoped to capture additional publicity by building the world’s tallest office
building. The title was then held by 40 Wall Street, but Chrysler expected that his
building in the newer office zone of midtown Manhattan would confirm a trend toward
relocation of major firms to the Grand Central area. He did not achieve his goal because
the owners of the nearby rival Empire State Building commissioned a last-minute change
of design from their architects and erected a higher tower. Nevertheless, the Chrysler
tower earns more aesthetic admiration.
The imaginations of architect and client were constrained by the zoning regulations of
New York City, which decreed that buildings taller than specified limits had to be set
back from the building line on several sides. The setback rules applied particularly to the
silhouette above a legal multiple of the adjacent street width. Above that level, the
building had to recede until it occupied only one-quarter of the site, at which point it
could rise as a tower to any height that the owner desired; this accounts for the setbacks
and tower of the Chrysler Building.
Their imaginations were also constrained by the building code, which required
provisions for safety and health, and also by the customs of the day. These determined
that tenants would not rent office space that was more than 30 feet from perimeter
windows, as deeper spaces were considered to lack sufficient light and air. Accordingly,
owners and architects designed insets, courtyards, and other receding forms to produce
maximal office space and minimal storage or service space, as the latter rented at lower
rates per square foot.
No constraints seem to have operated when it came to decorating the Chrysler
Building. At ground level, shops along the street and the entrances to the building were
given angular decoration, much of it in metal that forecast vibrant embellishments inside.
The lobby, entered from both Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, appears triangular, thus
unusual in a city where axial lobbies are the norm. The Chrysler’s lobby is decorated in
warm colors of inlaid wood, of metal, and of paint. Above the marble and granite walls, a
ceiling mural by Edward Trumbull depicts the building, airplanes, the Chrysler
automobile assembly line, and other emblems of modernity. The 30 elevator cabs are
inlaid in wood veneer on steel, featuring simplified floral forms and geometric shapes,
separated into panels.
The office floors have double-loaded corridors and office spaces that were standard at
the period of their construction; several revisions have-been made to parts of the interior
since the building was completed in 1930. At the top of the tower is a tall space,
furnished for dining and receptions. The exterior surface is made primarily of pale brick
over a steel frame; stainless steel marks the entrances, decorative details, and the tower.
Tower lighting, originally planned, was activated in 1981.
Minor alterations and restoration especially of the lobby, entrances, and ornamental
features, followed several changes of ownership. In 1978 the New York City Landmarks
Preservation Commission designated the Chrysler Building as a municipal landmark.
This prevents the owners from changing the designated features unless severe economic
hardship can be demonstrated. Aware of the building’s prestige, owners have generally
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been willing to repair essential functional and ornamental features. The building is now
admired as a delightful relic of an optimistic era in skyscraper building and an urban icon,
although, having always functioned as an obvious selfadvertisement, it has not been
regarded as a seminal work of modern architecture.

François Auguste Choisy

Architectural engineer and historian, France
François Auguste Choisy is in many ways the ideological link between significant
individuals such as Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Auguste Perret and Vitruvius and Le
Corbusier; his influence on the beginnings of the Modern movement was fundamental.
Born in 1841, Choisy was the son of an architect practicing in Vitry-le-François in
northeastern France. His interests in mathematics and architecture quickly led him to the
École Polytechnique under Léonce Reynaud, author of the influential Traité d’architecture (1860; Treaty on
Architecture), and eventually to the prestigious École des Ponts et Chaussées. His
professional career as civil engineer originated in 1865, while still within the junior ranks
of the latter institution, when he was dispatched to the Rhone region; there, he began to
investigate the significance of the surrounding Gallo-Roman monuments. During the
same year he traveled to Greece, undertaking technical analyses of, among other
monuments, the Parthenon; his work on stylobate and column curvature remains
important within the study of classical architecture. Graduating second at the École des
Ponts et Chaussées in 1866, he was awarded a travel bursary that he ultimately used to
visit Italy.
In 1868 Choisy took on his official duties as engineer within the Département des
Ponts et Chaussées at Rethel, France. In 1870 he met Viollet-le-Duc, who was already
well known for his Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72; Commentaries on Architecture). Choisy remained with
the government department for his entire career, moving up the ranks as chief engineer
and eventually inspector general, all the while teaching architectural history at the École
des Ponts et Chaussées, the École d’Horticulture de Versailles, and the École
Polytechnique. His interests extended beyond historical studies, organizing the public
works programs for the French installations at the universal expositions in Vienna (1873),
Philadelphia (1876), Melbourne (1880), and Paris (1878, 1889, and 1900).
During his initial sojourn in Italy, Choisy began outlining his first substantial
publication, L’Art de bâtir chez les Remains (1873; The Art of Roman Building). His interpretation of Roman
building technique focused on brick masonry and vault construction; he emphasized that
material and labor thriftiness was central to Roman construction, modeling his analyses
in part on Robert Willis’s work and ultimately comparing his own observations to the
words in Vitruvius’s De architecture, libr i decem (1st century B.C.; The Ten Books on Architecture). Choisy used
a complex three-dimensional drawing technique, the plunging isometric, which allowed
for the depiction of plan, elevation, section, and interior layout within single engravings.
The work established him as an authority in classical architecture, and similar studies
followed, including L’Art de bâtir chez les Bizantines (1883; The Art of Byzantine Building), Études épigraphiques sur l’archi tecture greque (1883; Epigraphic
Studies on Greek Architecture), L’Art de bâti r chez les Égyptiens (1904; The Art of Egyptian Building), and his tour de
force, His toire de l’architecture (1899; The History of Architecture).
Comprehensive and systematic, Choisy’s 1899 architectural history book was a textual
and visual account of building methods in culture, time, and space; it included his own
1700 drawings, presenting the culmination of his lectures and studies, distilled within a
comprehensive analysis of architecture from prehistory to the end of the 18th century.
Each historical section was first contextualized within the broader work, with the
technical aspects of building following immediately afterward. Choisy’s thesis that form
follows local environmental and cultural conditions was buttressed throughout the book,
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underscoring his view that architecture is generated by the collective and not the
individual. To the historian, style and form derive from the creative use of materials,
labor, and ideas; architecture is the result of the adaptations of historical precedents on
the one hand and the solution to immediate problems on the other. The connection
between form and technique was thus achieved, making the influence of Viollet-le-Duc
abundantly clear. In his section on Gothic architecture, in fact, Choisy bases much of his
discussion on the work of the latter as well as on Willis’s, further elaborating their
theories and subsequently contributing to the spread of their ideas.
As with his discussion of the Gothic, Choisy refined previous theories, particularly as
they related to Greek architecture. He advanced the thesis that Greek builders did not rely
solely on symmetry and axial alignment, as previous historians had often concluded; he
noted that the ensemble of monuments interacted within more complex landscapes. He
went back to his studies of the Parthenon—a model that Le Corbusier would echo just a
few decades later. Coupled with Choisy’s translation of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architectu re (published
posthumously in 1909), the His toire de l’architecture served as a base text for the theory expounded in Le
Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture (1923; Toward a New Architecture). Le Corbusier turned to Choisy’s
history book for Parthenon and Acropolis details, pointing to symmetrical buildings
arranged within asymmetrical site layouts and discussing the evolution of classical types.
Central to Le Corbusier’s thesis was that pure architecture works on an emotive level
with the viewer. He termed modénature, the act of controlling emotion by visual stimulus; the term
was translated in his Vers Une Architecture as “contour and profile.” This, of course, was directly tied to
Choisy’s notion that the Greeks used contours and profiles to arrive at their optical
corrections; Choisy borrowed from Vitruvius in his examination of moldings, adding his
own ideas relating to the use of light in controlling the viewer’s experience. Le Corbusier
in turn followed Choisy and adapted ideas on light within his theoretical principles.
In 1903, just before his death, Choisy received the Royal Institute of British
Architects’ Gold Medal for his lifetime contribution to the study of architecture and, in
significant ways, to the meaning of architectural history during the early 20th century.