New York Skyline

For a few months in 1929 and 1930, the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street were openly competing to be the tallest in the world. 40 Wall Street announced its final height first. Chrysler's architect had secretly assembled a 125-foot stainless steel spire inside the building's crown, and raised it through the roof in about ninety minutes — taking the title before anyone could respond.

Chrysler held it for eleven months. The Empire State Building, built in 410 days, took it in 1931 and kept it for forty years. Both crowns are still the most recognisable shapes in the silhouette, and both exist in that form because of a competition rather than a brief.

The stepped profiles on New York's pre-war towers come from the 1916 Zoning Resolution, passed after the Equitable Building cast a seven-acre shadow and convinced the city that unrestricted bulk would take daylight off the streets entirely. The rule required buildings to step back as they rose, and in doing so it accidentally created the wedding-cake shape that defines the era.

That is why the older towers taper and the newer ones — One World Trade, the slender residential towers on 57th Street — do not. In a model those two logics have to coexist, which is why New York takes more frames of reference to get right than any other city we produce.

Manhattan reads south to north. One World Trade anchors the downtown end at 1,776 feet, tapering through eight elongated triangles to a square top, with 70 Pine and the Woolworth Building's Gothic crown beside it.

Midtown carries the shapes people know best: the Empire State Building's stepped mast, the Chrysler Building's seven radiating stainless arches, and behind them the newer generation — One Vanderbilt's faceted taper, 432 Park's plain square grid, and the pencil-thin residential towers along 57th Street that are narrower than almost anything else in the world at that height. The contrast between the 1930s crowns and the blank modern shafts is the point of the composition.