Uplifting the Skylines

BUILDING Uplifing the Skylines

The enormous appetite of businessmen for new office space is lifting the economy as well as the skylines of the U.S. From Honolulu to Boston, from New Orleans to Chicago, seldom have so many new towers changed the urban landscape or taken shape on architects' drafting boards and in corporate budgets.

This week workmen will hoist the final structural steel beam into place for Atlanta's 26-story Life Insurance Co. of Georgia building. Los Angeles will celebrate the similar "topping out" of its tallest building yet, the 42-story, $30 million Union Bank Square. In Manhattan, wreckers have just begun smashing a ramshackle clutch of century-old eyesores to make room for the world's highest skyscrapers, the twin 110-story 1,350-ft. structures of the Port of New York Authority's World Trade Center.* Boston's State Street Bank & Trust Co. is busy shifting 1,000 employees into its new 30-story office, and later this month some 4,000 federal workers will start moving into Boston's new 24-story John F. Kennedy building.

Rising every year since 1959, expenditures for office building in the U.S. reached a peak of $2.5 billion last year, but the Census Bureau expects these figures to climb another 16% to $2.9 billion in 1966. New contracts for office buildings surged 25% ahead of their 1965 pace during the first two months of this year, according to F. W. Dodge construction statistics.

Corridor of Towers. New York City, still by far the leader, continues to amaze the pessimists by consuming vast amounts of office space and crying for more. Since World War II, 182 new structures with 66 million sq. ft. of office space have gone up in Manhattan, giving the island not only the highest quality space in the nation but also over a third of the U.S. total. Even with another 35 skyscrapers under way or planned, which will have as much space as the entire office supply of Boston, New York is experiencing a shortage. In the resulting scramble, corporations lease offices in buildings many months before they are built.

The 15-mile corridor from downtown Los Angeles to the U.C.L.A. campus is filling with office towers. Although San Francisco has added over 3,000,000 ft. of downtown office space in three years, the big new John Hancock and International buildings opened with 100% occupancy. Detroit went 30 years without a new office building, but builders recently completed three at once. Pittsburgh's famous Golden Triangle will double its office space in the next 18 months, and demand is so strong that Builder John Galbreath has just lifted his plans for a new U.S. Steel office from 50 to 65 stories. Overbuilding has put a lid on further expansion in several cities including Denver, Akron, Kansas City and Dallas, but the proliferation of paper work and the economy's long expansion still feed demand elsewhere.

Subsidized Barbers. Chicago, where the skyscraper was invented, not only built more office space last year than at any time since 1930, but showed the trade some new tricks. The 35-story Brunswick Building typifies the trend toward amenities that lure tenants away from older but cheaper quarters: huge (7 ft. by 9 ft.) picture windows, plaza-like setbacks, a subterranean shopping arcade connecting to the adjacent subway and civic center through an underground tunnel. Restaurants, a tobacco shop and a barber shop, whose rent often has to be subsidized by the landlord, have also become essential.

In the pursuit of splendors to keep image-conscious tenants--and their employees--happy, office builders have also turned to alfresco terraces, interior courtyards, Olympic-sized pools, or such vaulted Romanesque colonnades as embellish Houston's Jefferson Chemical Building. Peachtree Center, Atlanta's version of Rockefeller Center, boasts a two-story concrete sculpture that has become a conversation piece in the South. Los Angeles' new Occidental Center offers not only a tenants' lounge, an exercise room, an auditorium and a ground-level patio but also a 30th-floor Zen Buddhist garden where tenants can enjoy serenity in the sun--or as the case may be, the smog.

*Without its 222-ft. television mast, the Empire State Building reaches an altitude of only 1,250ft.

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