An interesting development in the planning of present day office buildings is the change in the conception that the architect has of his work. The day that he could sit before his drawing board and make pretty sketches of decidedly uneconomic monuments to himself has gone. His scorn of things "practical" has been replaced by an intense earnestness to make practical necessities that armature upon which he moulds the form of his idea. Instead of being the intolerant aesthete, he is one of a group of experts upon whom he depends for the success of his work, for the modern large building with its complicated machinery is beyond the capacity of any one man to master, and yet he must, in order to control the disposition and arrangement of this machine, have a fairly accurate general knowledge of what it is all about. Added to this he must know how to plan his building so that it will "work" economically.
In this spirit of cooperation with experts, the builder and the engineer, the effort was made to solve the problem of the design of the Empire State. The programme was short - a fixed budget, no space more than 28 feet [8.5 metres] from window to corridor, as many stories of such space as possible, an exterior of limestone, and completion by May 1 1931, which meant a year and six months from the beginning of sketches.
The logic of the plan is very simple. A certain amount of space in the centre, arranged as compactly as possible, contains the vertical circulation, toilets, shafts and corridors. Surrounding this is a perimeter of office space 28-feet deep. The sizes of the floors diminish as the elevators decrease in number. In essence there is a pyramid of non-rentable space surrounded by a greater pyramid of rentable space, a principle modified of course by the practical consideration of construction and elevator operation. The four groups of high-rise elevators are placed in the centre of the building with the low-rise groups adjoining on the east and west sides so that as these drop off, the building steps back from the long dimension of the property to approach the square form of the shaft, with the result that instead of being a tower, set upon a series of diminishing setbacks prescribed by the zoning law, the building becomes all tower rising from the great five-storey base. At this point, there entered the last and perhaps the most important item in the owner's programme - speed of construction. Hardly a detail was issued without having been thoroughly analysed by the builders and their experts and adjusted and changed to meet every foreseen delay. Choice of interior marbles was limited to those which could be obtained in time to be fabricated and set.
As far as possible hand work was done away with, for in quantity production with thousands of pieces of each material identical in shape and size, the delay would have been disastrous. Windows, spandrels, steel mullions and stone, all fabricated in various parts of the country, were designed so that they could be duplicated in tremendous quantity and brought to the building and put together almost like an automobile on the assembly line. The adaptation of the design to conditions of use, construction and speed has been kept to the fore throughout the development. Whatever "style" may result is a logical answer to the problems set by the demands of this unprecedented programme.
Biographies
William Frederick Lamb
1883: Born November 21 in Brooklyn. Studies at William College, Columbia University.
1911: Receives a diploma from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris.
1911: Joins Carrere and Hastings.
1920: Becomes partner of Carrere and Hastings, alongside Shreve.
1925: Shreve and Lamb establish their own practice.
1930: Construction begins on Empire State Building.
1952: Dies, September 8 in New York.
Arthur Loomis Harmon
1878: Born in Chicago.
1901: Graduates from Columbia University.
1902: Joins McKim, Mead and White, pioneers of the Beaux Arts movement and designers of Grand Central station.
1911: Associates with Wallis and Goodwillie .
1913-1929: Practises in his own name; gains recognition for residential hotels.
1924: Completes the Shelton Hotel
1929: Joins Shreve and Lamb.
1930: Construction begins on Empire State Building.
1958: Dies, October 17 in White Plains, New York.