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Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building

Woolworth Building, 1913 View

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John Marin's New York
Some of Marin’s most memorable works are those of New York City done between 1910 and 1920. A motif that he returned to multiple times was Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, completed in 1913 and located in Lower Manhattan. Marin’s images of the iconic skyscraper are influenced by multiple sources, ranging from the artist’s American background to contemporary criticism of skyscrapers, a relatively new building type. Initially appearing as spontaneous representations of the structure, upon further analysis, it is clear that a great deal of thought and emotional energy has been invested into the works.

While Marin adopts the same perspective used in contemporary commercial images of the New York City skyline, which was a view from the water or framing a skyscraper with other buildings, he subverts this mode of representation by destabilizing the Woolworth Building in both his watercolors and etchings. This subversion of perspective creates a pictorially contained chaos, one that reflects the energy of the dynamic city and the artist’s ambivalent feelings about it.

Marin could see the Gothic skyscraper from his home at the northeast corner of Twenty-Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue.[1] One has to ask, why did Marin choose the Woolworth Building to represent the various factors mentioned? Simply put, the skyscraper was a uniquely American symbol of modernity, and seen as a physical reflection of the energy of urban life. As the tallest building in the skyline, the Woolworth Building was something with which the people of New York would be familiar. By employing a recognizable symbol to ground his compositions, Marin enables other people to read the visual expression of his thoughts and feelings.

New York City was alive to John Marin, something that was both exciting and scary at times. This ambivalent feeling about the city contributes to the creation of dynamic images that feel a bit chaotic. Quite aptly, MacKinley Helm said, “Art was a mystical something between Manhattan and Marin.”[2] One senses genuine reaction in Marin’s images of New York City, and Marin expressed a desire to visually represent the emotions that the city evoked in him. Marin was “unable to regard anything as ‘inanimate’,” as he thought that there was “life and motion even in the steel, brick and mortar high buildings of a great city.”[3] One can assume that he felt this way about the Woolworth. Alfred Stieglitz once noted that “Marin had fallen in love with [the Woolworth] at first sight,” making it no surprise that Marin returned to the motif many times.[4]

The most insightful text for interpreting Marin’s images of the Woolworth Building is his note in the Exhibition Guide for a show at 291 in 1913.
“The later pictures of New York shown in this exhibition may need the help of an explanation. These few words are written to quicken your response to my point of view. Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings themselves dead? We have been told somewhere that a work of art is a thing alive. You cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you. Therefore if these buildings move me they too must have life. Thus the whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive. It is this ‘moving of me’ that I try to express, so that I may recall the spell I have been under and behold the expression of the different emotions that have been called into being. How am I to express what I feel so that its expression will bring me back under the spells? Shall I copy facts photographically? I see great forces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these ‘pull forces,’ those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other’s power. In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other things; the bigger assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive to be seen and in so doing change their bent and direction. While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played. / And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing. Within the frames there must be a balance, a controlling of these warring, pushing, pulling forces. This is what I am trying to realize. But we are all human.”[5]
[1] MacKinley Helm, John Marin (New York: Da Capo Press, 1948), 32.
[2] MacKinley Helm. “Conclusion to a Biography.” in John Marin Memorial Exhibition (Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1955), no page numbers.
[3] Quoted in Martha Tedeschi, “Great Forces at Work: John Marin’s New York,” in John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism. ed. Martha Tedeschi and Kristi Dahm. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2010), 122.
[4] Ibid., 99.
[5] John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin. ed. Dorothy Newman (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949), 4-5.

Liz Horner
Introduction Fast Facts on the Woolworth Building:
Location: New York City
Architect: Cass Gilbert
Patron: F. W. Woolworth
Completion: 1913
Height: 792 feet
Tallest Building in the World from 1913-1930

On April 24, 1913, in what one observer called “the premier publicity stunt of this or any other day,” US President Woodrow Wilson pushed a button on his desk in the White House and caused the recently completed Woolworth Building on lower Broadway in Manhattan to be brilliantly illuminated. The sight astonished crowds in City Hall Park below, as well as thousands who watched from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River and even on boats in New York Harbor and farther out to sea.[1] Thus was inaugurated one of the canonical monuments in New York City, the United States, and the history of the skyscraper.
Architect Cass Gilbert was already well established professionally when he received the commission from dime-store magnate F. W. Woolworth to design his signature Manhattan tower. An Ohio native, Gilbert was raised primarily in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His architectural education began in the office of a Saint Paul practitioner and continued at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied for a year under William Robert Ware. The neoclassical training he received under Ware was complemented by a stint in the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White, where he assisted the legendary Stanford White. Gilbert returned to the Midwest and started his own firm in Saint Paul in 1883. He gained a great deal of national attention from the 1898 design of the Minnesota state capitol, and on the strength of that, relocated his firm’s main office to New York City the following year. Gilbert’s design for the monumental beaux-arts U.S. Custom House at the foot of Manhattan solidified his professional standing with its completion in 1907.[2] From then on, Gilbert operated an active national firm that executed a variety of public and private commissions. His designs demonstrated his knowledge of art and architecture by incorporating a wide range of historical stylistic references. At the time of his death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York lamented the loss of a valued trustee and praised his “spacious mind.”[3]
When it was completed, the Woolworth Building received vast international press coverage and attracted the interest of artists working in a variety of mediums, who perceived in the building the dynamism of the modern city. The painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand, for example, incorporated the Woolworth Building into their film Manhatta (1921), a paean to the burgeoning commercial city. Perhaps the artist who most persistently and enthusiastically depicted the building was John Marin. He provided a published explanation of the New York watercolors and oils exhibited at the Photo-Secession’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in 1913, and there asked rhetorically, by way of explaining his animated pictures of the city’s monuments, “Are the buildings themselves dead?” Clearly not: “Thus the whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive.”[4] The soaring height of the Woolworth Building, as well as its intricate Gothic-inspired terra-cotta exterior, made Marin and others feel that it was leaping into the sky.
Despite the early acclaim for the building, Gilbert’s Gothicizing approach lost its appeal with the subsequent development of the modernist skyscraper. Indeed, the architect was generally disparaged, as were many others of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for having purportedly clung to outworn historical formulae and traditions. Nevertheless, the impact of postmodernism in the 1970s and ’80s led to a new appreciation for Gilbert’s work.[5] With the Woolworth Building and the Custom House, among other works, Gilbert contributed to the modernization of lower Manhattan in the early decades of the twentieth century.
However much the Gothic imagery of the Woolworth Building may have been anathema to modernists, there was no doubt that Gilbert’s design satisfied the complex requirements of an office tower that housed many workers in addition to a bank and recreation area (including a basement-level swimming pool). Furthermore, the Woolworth Building was served by the mechanical systems that in fact made the skyscraper, as a building type, possible, such as elevators, electricity, plumbing, and more. The complexity of the tower, in turn, demanded thousands of drawings of different kinds. As Mary Beth Betts has noted, Gilbert’s office produced thirty alternative plans for the Woolworth Building, as well as a number of perspective sketches in which he toyed with different approaches to the composition and detailing. Once the basic approach was settled upon, Gilbert maintained that the actual working drawings had been made in just eighty-six days.[6] This was an especially significant feat, given the high quality of working drawings for which the architect was known. Large collections of them from Gilbert’s office—sketches, working drawings, and presentation drawings—are housed at the New-York Historical Society and the Library of Congress; they have supported the spate of publications on the building and its architect over the past fifteen years or so.[7]
Coinciding with the celebration of the Woolworth Building’s centennial in 2013 was the discovery of a previously unknown cache of more than 150 working drawings produced by Gilbert’s office. Acquired by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery through a partial gift from architects Gwen and Don Reiman, the drawings include early site plans, sections, elevations, details, and drawings for the mechanical systems. Since many of the drawings, mostly pen and ink on tracing paper, linen, or paper, frequently bear later annotations such as “superseded,” they illustrate the evolution of a complex design over the course of the several years during which the building was under construction. They show not just the mind of an accomplished architect at work, but also the legions of little-known draftsmen and builders who contributed to the making of a national icon. They also confirm what the Brickbuilder claimed in 1914, that “Mr. Gilbert’s office has always turned out extremely well finished working drawings, because [he] himself [is] a draftsman of superior grade and likes and appreciates technically good drawings.”[8]

[1] Gail Fenske, “Medievalism, Mysticism, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century New York: Cass Gilbert’s ‘Skyscraper Gothic,’” in Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings, ed. Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly (University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2017), p. 75.
[2] Geofrey Blodgett, “Cass Gilbert, Architect: Conservative at Bay,” Journal of American History, vol. 72, no. 3 (December 1985), pp. 615–619.
[3] “Cass Gilbert: In Memoriam,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 29, no. 6 (1934), p. 90.
[4] John Marin, quoted in “Society News,” American Photography, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1913), p. 239.
[5] Sharon Irish, “Cass Gilbert in Practice, 1882–1934,” in Inventing the Skyline: The Architecture of Cass Gilbert, ed. Margaret Heilbrun (Columbia University Press, New York, 2000), p. 28.
[6] Mary Beth Betts, “From Sketch to Architecture: Drawings in the Cass Gilbert Office,” ibid., pp. 57–66.
[7] Most notably, Gail Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008).
[8] “Monographs on Architectural Renderers: 5. The Work of Thomas R. Johnson,” Brickbuilder, vol. 23 (1914), pp. 110, 112, quoted in Betts, “From Sketch to Architecture,” p. 66.

Adapted from Kevin D. Murphy, "The Woolworth Building on the Drafting Board." The Magazine Antiques (January/February 2018), pp. 68-70.
The Seagram and Woolworth Buildings as Architectural Translations of Business Success The commission of the Woolworth and the Seagram buildings was like those of most skyscrapers of their time; they were statements of power, commercially for the corporations they housed, and personally for the patrons whose names were associated with them. The Woolworth Building was constructed to honour its client Frank W. Woolworth. It was meant to showcase his business success while the Seagram Building also had a corporate affiliation with the Seagram company and CEO Samuel Bronfman as the client.

The Woolworth Building was commissioned by Frank Woolworth who became wealthy after founding the well-known chain that was F. W. Woolworth & Co. Five and Ten Cent Stores. His stores were a new development in commerce as he created a chain with a dominant position in a sector of a market.[1] Woolworth stimulated consumer desire and promoted the type of consumerism that reached across many social classes with consistent pricing for desired goods.[2] It was through this talent in merchandizing and a large ego that fueled him that he accumulated such wealth to pay for the Woolworth Building. Woolworth sold goods for amounts that appealed to price-conscious people and yet price consciousness was not on his mind or in his plans while imagining the Woolworth Building. A chain with a particular identity was a new idea, and Woolworth embraced the attention this business model was attracting and was obviously comfortable converting its identity into a head office building which he conceived as an “imposing urban monument.”[3] The Woolworth Building was undoubtedly built with the intention of being a visible reflection of his business success. Frank W. Woolworth was supposedly quite head strong and driven and once he captured an audience economically, he wanted to further extend this gesture with “his seemingly sudden decision to build a gigantic and extremely visible Gothic Skyscraper, the height of which topped all earlier records, and he did.”[4] Woolworth’s head office space only took up one and a half floors in total (floors 23 and 24) while the rest was retail space for tenants. Interestingly, a gigantic structure was not needed for the company’s size but, instead, it was needed to showcase the power of the Woolworth name in the skyline of New York City.

The Seagram Building was built with similar intentions as the Woolworth Building. It was to be an iconic structure in the city of New York, but for a different corporation and patron and designed by a different architect. The Seagram Building was commissioned by Samuel Bronfman, the CEO and founder of the Distillers Corporation Limited which acquired the Seagram Distillery Company and kept its name, both of which having Canadian roots.[5] Bronfman was a business man who valued organization and hard work all the while following the motto he “tried to live by: Integrity—Tradition—Craftsmanship.”[6] In the 1930s, Samuel Bronfman took sole and full control of Seagram from his brothers and continued to ensure its dominant position in the liquor industry of North American.[7] This was possible due to Bronfman’s entrepreneurial skills as he was “an exceptional industrialist and strategist.”[8] The head office space for Bronfman was in downtown Montréal, Québec. Bronfman established the subsidiary Seagram, of parent company Distillers Corporation Limited, in the United States by purchasing distilleries and moving into office space in New York City, which happened not long after Prohibition was repealed in 1933.[9] Bronfman extended his entrepreneurial skills into advertising and marketing as he branded Seagram products while instilling his belief of “valu[ing] quality in all things.”[10] As his company’s success and visibility grew, the single floor it occupied in the Chrysler Building no longer provided enough space. Bronfman, like Woolworth, understood you had to spend money to obtain it, a philosophy that is reflected in the former’s plan for Seagram’s new head office. The intention behind the Seagram Building was to be more than just a head office. Phyllis Lambert captures in her book, Building Seagram, what the Seagram Building truly stood for: “The Seagram building was to be more than a company headquarters: I believe [Samuel Bronfman] came to see it as a monument to the opportunities business afforded in the New World, a monument to his company, which was his own doing, and therefore, ultimately, a monument to himself.”[11]

Although the two buildings were conceived and constructed in very different times and for different corporations, they were, as skyscrapers, “meant to be correlated with the appearance of large-scale enterprise on the American economic scene.”[12] The Woolworth and Seagram Buildings were intended to demonstrate not only business success but actually stand as monuments of power for their privately-held corporations and to act as signatures in the city for their patrons. Their commissions played a large role in the constellation of factors that brought them into being and ensured their lasting impact. The two patrons not only invested a great deal of money but also lent their names to a large structure. They obviously wanted the design of their skyscraper to be in the hands of someone who could carry out and translate their vision into reality with impact, power, and skill.

[1] Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895-1915," in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940, (JHU Press, 1997), 129-159.
[2] Gail Fenske, The Skyscraper and the City: the Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
[3] Fenske, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building," 143.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Phyllis Lambert and Barry Bergdoll, Building Seagram (New York: Yale University Press, 2013).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Graham D. Taylor, "“From Shirtsleeves to Shirtless”: The Bronfman Dynasty and the Seagram Empire," Business and Economic History Online 4, no. 1 (2006): 1-36.
[9] Lambert, Building Seagram, 7.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, 2.
[12] Fenske, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building," 130.

Nina Christianson
Exterior The exterior of the Woolworth Building dominated the New York skyline when it was finished in 1913. Rising 792 feet above the ground, the Woolworth Building was intended as a visual expression of the Woolworth Company's status in the business world. The building's distinctive profile also served as advertisement for the company, and the company gained publicity from articles about the building's status as the tallest structure in the world.

This drawing shows details of a bay on the 37th floor on the Barclay Street elevation of the building. Like the rest of the building's exterior, this section was executed in a Gothic Revival style. The Gothic was first used for soaring cathedrals in medieval Europe, and the verticality of the Gothic made it an apt choice for F.W. Woolworth's soaring skyscraper.

This drawing shows details for the building's terra cotta ornament. The vertical piers of the exterior were numbered, with numbers nine and ten shown in this drawing. This modern photo shows polychrome terra cotta on the building's tower.

The soaring height of the Woolworth Building and other skyscrapers would not have been possible without steel-frame technology. Other modern technologies, like plumbing and electricity, were incorporated into the building. As shown in this drawing, these systems were complex and required coordination with contractors like Albert Webster, the sanitary engineer whose office drew this section of the building.
Noble Commercialism: Woolworth and PSFS Buildings as Progenitors of Skyscraper Architecture The construction of the Woolworth Building in New York City can simultaneously be seen as the culmination of architect Cass Gilbert’s foray into the Gothic Revival style as applied to skyscrapers, and the forerunner of the following decade’s Skyscraper Gothic motif that led to the full-blown Art Deco style of skyscraper construction. Similarly, the PSFS Building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was conceived after a decade’s worth of early European Modernism, which helped set the stage for the flourishing of International style skyscrapers in the postwar period. Furthermore, both buildings are manifestations of their corporations' personal visions as relates to their guiding philosophy in conducting business, and both companies found it advantageous to capitalize on the real estate afforded by the generous floor plans to supplement their revenue. Lastly, the buildings were and are central to understanding how the public perceived and reacted to growing urbanity and ever more daring skyscraper styles, ultimately influencing the identity of their respective cities by becoming integral assets and fixtures in the public perception. This paper aims to present Woolworth and PSFS as near-contemporaries, spaced a mere 19 years apart, to give insight into why skyscrapers like these enter the standard lexicon of American architecture ahead of others.

Benjamin She
The Woolworth Building as an Architectural Model for the Columbian Mutual Tower   The Woolworth Building housed and promoted the world’s preeminent discount retail company in the early twentieth century. Frank Winfield Woolworth worked in a dry goods store before opening “Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store” in 1878 in Utica, New York. While this first store failed, the second, opened in 1879 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was successful. Over the next decades, Woolworth franchised a chain of stores across the United States and England. In 1910, the company merged with its four major competitors to form the F. W. Woolworth Company. After this merger, Woolworth’s had 611 stores, and F. W. Woolworth began planning his company’s signature headquarters. After 1886 Woolworth’s head offices were located in New York City, where most of the company’s suppliers were located. In 1888 Woolworth began renting space at 280 Broadway (Trench and Snook, 1845), three blocks north of the future site of the Woolworth Building. The company thus had a corporate presence in the business district near City Hall decades before its own signature skyscraper was begun. The Woolworth Company’s construction of their landmark headquarters would reflect the retailer’s ambitions to be a economic leader whose brand was known worldwide.
            When F. W. Woolworth chose to build a separate headquarters for his company, he began a process that ultimately resulted in the world’s tallest building. Woolworth purchased a lot on the corner of Broadway and Park Place, across the street from City Hall Park. He hired Cass Gilbert, an architect who was educated at the École de Beaux Arts in Paris and designed the New York Customs House (1901-1907) before receiving the commission for the Woolworth Building. Gilbert also designed smaller skyscrapers in New York, among them the West Street Building (1905-1907), which foreshadowed the use of Gothic forms in the Woolworth Building. Woolworth’s company headquarters was initially intended to be ten to sixteen stories, but its height was subsequently increased to surpass neighboring buildings. It was further increased after Woolworth visited Europe, where he was frequently asked about the 1907 Singer Building (Ernest Flagg), which was the tallest building in the world at its completion measuring 612 feet. Woolworth later recalled that this inspired him “to erect a building that would advertise the Woolworth five and ten cent stores all over the world.”[1] The Woolworth Building would also surpass the 1909 Metropolitan Life Building (Napoleon LeBrun), which stood at 700 feet. Its status as the tallest building in the world came to be a defining aspect of the Woolworth Building in both its design and its public reception.
            Woolworth and Gilbert chose the Gothic mode for the Woolworth Building in order to express of the building’s verticality. The Woolworth Building features a thirty-story tall, U-shaped base topped by a thirty story tower. The exterior is covered in cream colored terra-cotta, with pointed arches, tracery, and polychrome terra-cotta decorating the lower stories and the window spandrels of upper stories. Both the wings of the base and the tower are topped with steeply pitched copper roofs weathered to a green hue. The building’s overall form was determined, in part, by the economics of skyscraper design; the base’s two wings form a light court in the center that maximizes the number of windows providing light to the offices within, making them more attractive to potential tenants. The building’s styling reflected its architect’s views on skyscraper design. Gilbert argued that “the inevitable logic of design now bids us lift these huge masses in the air with aspiring verticals, accenting rather than dissembling their height,” which was manifested in the Woolworth Building’s unbroken vertical piers rising the entire height of the building.[2] The exterior’s polychromatic treatment was used to accentuate the building’s dominant lines and enhance the shadows, thereby creating dynamic depth.[3] The Woolworth Building was inspired primarily by secular examples like the medieval Hotel de Ville in Brussels, Belgium (Jacob van Thienen, 1420) and the Gothic Revival Houses of Parliament in London, England (Barry and Pugin, 1870), evidenced in the massing of the tower, which features tourelles on the corners and a steeply pitched, dormered roof. The building is not, however, “a copy of anything, it was designed to meet conditions as they existed here in the belief that the skyscraper problem could be solved and could be beautiful.”[4] The Woolworth Building, then, evidences the design philosophy of its architect as well as the ambition of its patron.
            The Woolworth Building quickly became the best-known example of the Commercial Gothic style, critically acclaimed for its design and known throughout the world for its height. Nationally published architecture periodicals like The Architectural Record praised the Woolworth Building because it “most unmistakably denotes its skeleton” and argued that “the great architectural success of the Woolworth Building is eminently the success of an expressive treatment.”[5] For the general public, however, the building’s most distinguishing characteristic was its height, and the executives of the Columbian Mutual Assurance Society would likely have read about the building in Atlanta newspapers in the years before they built their new headquarters in Memphis. In November 1917, The Atlanta Constitution bragged that a pile of the papers they printed weekly would measure 4,545 feet tall and “make Woolworth Building look like a cottage alongside of a skyscraper,” while a recurring advertisement in the paper juxtaposed an image of the Woolworth Building with a bottle of Lewis 66 Rye “towering away above the many brands of ordinary whiskey.”[6] Promotional materials described the Woolworth Building as “the Cathedral of Commerce,” which “set in motion a vast machine called industry, whose influences and benefits forever will be felt in every corner of the globe.”[7] They emphasized the building’s illumination, its efficient elevators, and its abundance of light and ventilation enabled by its sub-basement power plant. Media coverage portrayed the Woolworth Building as the preeminent modern skyscraper of the era, and by association its Skyscraper Gothic style became the preferred mode for major corporate buildings across the nation. Among them was the Columbian Mutual Tower (Figure Two), whose designers sought to capture the Woolworth Building’s associations with modernity and economic success by emulating its physical form.
[1] Leo L. Redding, "Mr. F. W. Woolworth's story," World's Work (April 1913), 664.
[2] Cass Gilbert, "The Architecture of Today;” lecture at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, May 4, 1909, pgs. 8-9, Box 16, Cass Gilbert Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[3] Cass Gilbert, “The Tenth Birthday of a Notable Structure,” in Real Estate Magazine of New York, (May 1923), 344.
[4] Cass Gilbert, “Regarding Woolworth Building,” manuscript written for part of an article to be prepared by an editor in Philadelphia, Box 17, Cass Gilbert Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[5] Montgomery Schuyler, “‘The Towers of Manhattan’ and Notes on the Woolworth Building,” The Architectural Record 33, no. 2 (February 1913), 104; 111.
[6] “New York’s Highest Buildings Dwarfed by Piles of Newspapers,” The Atlanta Constitution, November 15, 1917; “Away Above Everything,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 7, 1912.
[7] Edwin A. Cochran, The Cathedral of Commerce (New York: Broadway Park Place Co., 1916), 5.

Ellen Dement
Reinterpreting Traditions : Site
Jin Mao Tower is located in the Pudong Development District, which is a peninsula located right across the Yangtze River from the old Shanghai city center, Puxi. In 1990, the Pudong Development District was the first financial district ordered by the central government to follow Chairman Deng Xiaoping as part of his open-door policy planning. The opening of Pudong was not only for its development. It served as a carrier for Shanghai's establishment as a global financial trade and shipping center, and aimed to become the bridge between China and the world. The government drafted many benefits and subsidies to attract foreign investors, hoping Pudong to become the next Hong Kong or Tokyo and leading the financial development in China.[1] Jin Mao Tower is located very close to the river bank, making it visible to people across the Huangpu River and becoming the visual focal point of Pudong: when it was completed, it was the tallest building not only in Shanghai, but also in China. It was the first skyscraper project that was constructed in the Pudong area, and when it was under construction, the whole Pudong area economically lagged behind the city center of Shanghai. No buildings higher than one hundred meters were built in the Pudong area and the population was only one-tenth of the total population of Shanghai. Hence the saying goes, “People want a bed in Puxi (the city center) rather than a house in Pudong”.[2] Because people underestimated the Pudong area, during the commission meeting the representatives from Shanghai government said they wanted this new building to become “the new face of Pudong, the new face of Shanghai, and even the new face of China”.

The Woolworth Building was in a very similar location in New York, as its commissioner F. W. Woolworth (1852-1919) requested that the Cass Gilbert design an imposing monumental skyscraper as the landmark headquarters of his company that would “capture an entire urban audience by surprise with his seemingly sudden decision to build a gigantic and extremely visible Gothic skyscraper, the height of which topped all earlier records,” express the power and wealth of Woolworth Company, and serve as a standing advertisement.[3] Therefore he identified the site of Broadway and Park Place, right across from the Brooklyn Bridge, facing City Hall Park as the center of civic life in New York, so that the building would be visible from the whole lower Manhattan and even from New Jersey. It also demonstrates Woolworth’s civic-kindness to secure an institutional and a personal identity.[4]

[1] Lu Zhiguo, and Tao Yitao. China's Economic Zones: Design, Implementation and Impact (Reading: Paths International Ltd, 2012), 377.
[2] Ibid, 378.
[3] Adrian D. Smith, The Architecture of Adrian Smith: the SOM Years, 1980-2006 : Toward a Sustainable Future (Mulgrave, Victoria: Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd, 2015), 86.
[4] Gail Fenske and Deryck Holdsworth, "Corporate Identity and the New York Office Building: 1895-1915,” in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz, (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 143.

Qisen Song