Design
This commercial office building is clad in white terra cotta over a masonry wall. The Bayard Building was one of the first steel skeleton frame skyscrapers in New York City and the Department of Buildings raised numerous objections to the design before the plans were finally accepted. It is one of the first examples of the Chicago school style of architecture in New York City.
The division of the building into three sections – an ornamented base, a shaft of identical stacked floors, and a decorated crown – illustrates Sullivan's views on skyscraper design. At 13 stories and 162 feet (49 meters) high, the building does not attempt to disguise its height, but rather accentuates it by leaving relatively undecorated mullions and pilasters. Sullivan's signature ornate floral designs decorate the base and top of the facade, and across the spandrels below the window openings. Figural sculptures of angels were added at the request of the client, Silas Alden Condict, over Sullivan's objections.
Read more about this topic: Bayard-Condict Building
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)