Early American Commercial Architecture Styles

Earliest Structures

• America entered nationhood during the early industrial revolution taking place in Europe. Not only did America lack the steel with which to build modern buildings, the world lacked the precedent. We lacked the materials, and we had little functional understanding of industrial buildings. Whereas other building systems and building functions had decades if not centuries of design evolution, the earliest American commercial structures were improvised. An early saw mill, for example, began with the mechanization of the mill, the industrialized component, and improvised building systems, often borrowed from residential or agricultural buildings and built around it. It's difficult to identify a unique architecture style in this era as the function of these structures was still very much being discovered. Influences drew from residential architecture.

The Factory and Modernism

• As mechanization increased, the American economy changed. Tools created cottage industries. Infrastructure and roads began to consolidate cottage industries into factories where processes such as weaving or toolmaking could be done on a larger scale than ever before. And the machines were there to do the work. Only now, machines could help build the buildings that housed the work as steel became part of the American narrative. As form was still far out ahead of function, factories were often essentially boxes. They didn't need a pitched roof. They didn't even have windows, necessarily. What was incidental to the definition of industrial buildings became the roots of modernism. There were no ornaments, just expansive, simplified monoliths of concrete and steel, a movement lead in part by La Corbusier and his Espirit Neouveau in the early 20th Century.

The Skyscraper

• Few would deny the biggest revolution in American commercial architecture was the birth of the skyscraper. Many factors converged to create the platform for subsequent skyscraper architecture. The availability of steel and girder building systems were important. The rising price of office space in urban areas was important. Perhaps of greatest importance was the advent of the elevator. It was invented by Elisha Otis and installed in the Equitable Life Building, the first commercial building to have one and the birth of the skyscraper. Early skyscrapers had masonry perimeters and ornamentation drawn from other architectural traditions. Their interior framework was steel. These buildings were limited in size and thus design as stone and masonry could only reach so high.

Evolution of the Skyscraper

• Skyscrapers saw a new wave with technological advances in building systems. They shed their masonry perimeters and turned entirely to steel for support. Rather than being clad in stone and masonry ornamentation, they became clad in metal and glass. Still, their design was essentially a spire with variances being primarily ornamentation. Perhaps the most famous of which is the Art Deco of the Chrysler Building. Sky scrapers eventually joined with modernism. Function far outpaced fashion. Like factories, they were were modern boxes with little fanfare, housing commerce. The Sears tower (now The Willis Tower) is perhaps the best example of the simplified modernism in new-era skyscrapers.