The Glamour of the Chrysler Building
"Is the Chrysler Building the world's most glamorous building?" someone asked me recently. It was meant as a rhetorical question, a way of defining glamour. Without using the g-word, the WSJ's Bret Stephens makes the case:
[W]hat distinguishes the Chrysler is its ability to inspire, as few modern buildings do, a sense of fantasy. For one thing, it achieves a skyscraper's fundamental task: It soars. From its first recess, just above the Lexington Avenue entrance, it follows an uninterrupted vertical path directly to the 68th floor, and only then begins to taper toward the spire.
Then there is the way the building remains perennially modern, perhaps because it is forever the past's imagining of the future. The entrances -- framed in black granite, zig-zagging patterns of metal and opaque yellow glass -- seem drawn from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" or a Batman comic....
And finally -- again -- there is that fabled Chrysler top. Today's tall buildings (few of which really deserve to be called skyscrapers) are often nothing more than stacks of all but identical floors, none really different from the other except, perhaps, for the view. Not so in the Chrysler Building, where the highest nine stories become progressively smaller as they rise toward the vanishing point. Seen from within, it conveys the sensation of an aerie, or a crow's nest, or a mountaintop -- not merely a higher place, but another world.
Is it the world's most glamorous building? It may very well be, I said, but it has competition from Disney Hall, LA's instantly beloved and much photographed landmark. (Couples even take wedding pictures there.) While the Chrysler Building creates glamour through streamlining, Disney Hall does it with complexity, which creates mystery without hiding anything. It's too complicated to comprehend in full--a model for glamour in a world without privacy.
Of course, the world's most glamorous building could be the Taj Mahal. But I've never seen it.