Returning to America in 1904, the novelist Henry James complained that "monsters of greed" had transformed the New York of his youth into "a huge jagged city." During his absence, the skyscraper had been born from a marriage of technology and commercial growth, and was beginning-not without opposition-to dominate the country's urban skylines. Focusing on such major monuments as Adler and Sullivan's Wainwright Building (1891), William Van Alen's Chrysler Building (1930), and Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1958), this course will trace the development of America's greatest contribution to the Western cityscape from the first "elevator buildings" of the 1870s, through the Art Deco towers of the 1920s and the gleaming glass monoliths that proliferated after World War II, to the Postmodern skyscraper of today.
