ARCHITECTURAL CONCEPTION 



EARING its graceful out- 

 lines high above the sur- 

 rounding buildings, many of 

 which were considered only a 

 few years ago to be marvels 

 of the designer's skill, the 

 Tower of the Singer Building, 

 at the corner of Broadway 

 and Liberty Street, has be- 

 come as distinctive a feature of the sky line of New 

 York as the Egyptian pyramids are of the Valley of 

 the River Nile. 



While the construction of the entire building, 

 from bed rock to flag pole, presented problems that 

 taxed the ingenuity of the architect and engineer, 

 still it is the Tower that realized the dream of the de- 

 signer, completely revolutionized the prevailing archi- 

 tecture of such buildings, and gave to the Singer 

 Building its world-wide fame. 



The architect, Mr. Ernest Flagg, must be thor- 

 oughly imbued and governed by the thought that " a 

 thing of beauty is a joy forever," for certainly a more 

 artistic conception than this Tower would be hard 

 to conceive, and it is doubtful if an equally magnifi- 

 cent tower will ever be built unless it is a literal copy 

 of the Singer Building. 



In the financial district of Manhattan lying below 

 the City Hall, the available building space is so much 

 restricted and the demand for office room is so great 

 that land values have reached a phenomenally high 

 figure. Consequently, to obtain a fair return on 

 investments there has been a constantly increasing 

 tendency to build in the air what there is not space 

 for on the ground, and while property owners realize 

 that sooner or later some restriction will be placed on 

 the height of buildings, the trouble is to get a re- 

 striction that will not destroy the value of land in 

 lower New York. 



New York is essentially a " City of Centers," the 

 most prominent of which are the Hotel and Theat- 

 rical Section, on Broadway between Fourteenth 

 and Forty-fifth Streets; the Dry Goods Section, on 

 Sixth Avenue between Fourteenth and Thirty-fifth 

 Streets; and the Financial Downtown Section, occu- 

 pying most of that part of Manhattan Island below 

 Cortlandt Street. The latter section is established 

 by such controlling influences as the United States 

 Customs House and Sub-Treasury; the Stock ex- 

 changes; the principal banks, the great insurance 

 corporations; the transatlantic steamship offices, the 

 Produce, Cotton and Metal exchanges. 



The business man prefers his office in a location 

 easy of access to these great centers ; thus the concen- 

 tration of great office buildings is found in that part 

 of Manhattan below the City Hall. 



Mr. Flagg's solution of this problem is to allow 

 the building to cover the whole area of the lot for 

 a height of say 100 feet, and above that to restrict 

 the area covered by the building to about 25 per 

 cent of the area of the lot the height being left to 

 economical consideration. In other words, Mr. 

 Flagg would have New York a veritable city of tow- 

 ers, and if the towers were up to his standard of 

 beauty the result would be marvelous. 



His contention is, of course, that such construc- 

 tion will allow concentration with the least inter- 

 ference with light and air of one's own and the ad- 

 joining property. 



It might be recalled here that while our laws have 

 not yet forbidden the erection of a building that 

 cuts off the air and light of the neighboring property, 

 in England they go to the other extreme, so that if 

 one has enjoyed a certain view from his windows 

 for a number of years his neighbors are not al- 

 lowed to put up any building that will obstruct such 



view. 



[9] 



