The Skyscraper Design Service without a Signature

The 77-story Chrysler Building is celebrated for its infamous Art Deco needle spire structure with terraced, stainless-steel cladding in an arched sunburst pattern, and its flamboyant ornaments all relating to the automobile industry, including its hubcaps, eagles and hood-ornament decorations.

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The Chrysler Building plays a key role in New York’s commercial real estate’s historic 1929 developers’ “skyscraper race” for commissioning the tallest building, as does the backdrop of the constraints of the city’s zoning and setback rules. Zoning involves a specific set of rules that regulate the use, height, and bulk of every property in a municipality. Per New York City’s 1916 “Building Zone Resolution”, a/k/a the Zoning Resolution, the wall of any given tower that occupied more than 25% of its lot and faced a street could rise only to a certain height, proportionate to the street’s width, ​at which point the building had to be set back by a given proportion. This system of setbacks would continue upward until the tower reached a floor level in which that level’s floor area was 25% that of the ground level's area. After that 25% threshold was reached, the building could rise without restriction.

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In 1928, Time Magazine named Walter P. Chrysler its Man of the Year. That year, the Chrysler Corporation had gained notoriety for beginning its first major expansion by purchasing the properties and business of the Dodge Brothers Motor Company, and for recruiting Amelia Earhart to announce the new Plymouth automobile. And in the Fall of 1928, Mr. Chrysler had announced that he would build the tallest skyscraper in the world, at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan.

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The Chrysler Building was designed to surpass the existing record holder, the Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway, completed in 1913 for the company that controlled almost six hundred “five and dime” stores. By 1928, however, another building, at 40 Wall Street, was undergoing construction. (Later generations would know the building as “The Trump Building” because of the letters placed above the first floor in 1995.) Designed by H. Craig Severance, 40 Wall Street, as the headquarters of the Manhattan Company, then a bank and holding company (and later, one-half of the entity “Chase Manhattan Bank”), was rising to 70 stories tall, at 927 feet.​​

Because the 1916 Zoning Resolution had set the maximum size of a building, but not its base, as a percentage of the lot size, developers realized that if they decreased that percentage of the lot size, they could build substantially higher. This is why developers have since bought up adjacent properties and enlarged their underlying sites, i.e., to maximize the square footage of the tower of each floor.

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Mr. Chrysler did not have as many opportunities to purchase adjacent properties, and so his tower could not gain as many square feet per floor as that of 40 Wall Street. He retained Severance’s former architectural firm partner and competitor, William Van Allen, to work on a design to bring the Chrysler Building to its highest possible height. As the Manhattan Building was topping out and seemingly securing its position as the world’s tallest building, Chrysler’s contractors brought a boom truck to the site, and lifted to the building’s crown sections of what would be a 185-foot spire structure that included a 123-foot needle-like termination. Performing most of the work in metalworking shops in the building’s 67th and 75th floors, the workers secretly assembled the spire components inside the building. On October 23, 2029, one month after the completion of 40 Wall Street, and the very day before the stock market’s crash, over a course of only 90 minutes, workers hoisted the spire structure atop the building. Although not noticed for months behind the scaffolding that encased and shrouded the crown so that the workers could finish the stainless-steel cladding, this feat stretched the building’s height to 1,046 feet, gaining it the title of the world’s tallest building.

This new title lasted for 11 months, when the Empire State Building was completed at 1,250 feet, with 102 stories (and later 1,472 feet with the 1950 addition of a 222-foot-tall television transmission antenna).

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Van Alen, meanwhile, perhaps so carried away with winning the commission, had never signed a design services agreement with Mr. Chrysler. The building’s original developer, former New York State Senator William H. Reynolds, had retained Van Alen and they together developed several design modifications, with the “official ‘Reynolds Building’ design, published in August, 1928, [as] a far more conservative venture, with an Italianate dome that one critic said looked like Governor Al Smith’s derby hat, and with a brickwork pattern on the upper stories which cleverly (and cheaply) mimicked corner windows, and which is a recognizable feature of the Chrysler Building today.” (Pierpont, Claudia Roth, “The Silver Spire: How two men's dreams changed the skyline of New York”, The New Yorker (November 18, 2002).

In October 1928, Reynolds no longer had sufficient money to fund the construction. He sold his interest in the property, the design plans and architect’s services to Chrysler for more than $2.5 million. Chrysler awarded the construction general contract to Fred T. Ley & Co., Inc.

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Meanwhile, Chrysler worked with Van Alen to redesign the skyscraper to be higher, and made multiple modifications to the design of the dome, redesigning the tower from one with a squat, Romanesque dome to one with a long, tapering spire of shining steel.

After the building’s completion, Van Alen asked for his fee, i.e., the customary 6% of the cost of construction -- $14 million. Chrysler refused, claiming that Van Alen had taken bribes from vendors, and that Chrysler had not signed any contracts with Van Alen when he took over the project. Van Alen sued and filed a mechanic’s lien on the property.

Van Alen may have fairly believed that there existed within his design services agreement with Reynolds an assignment clause obligating Chrysler to pay Van Alen on the same terms, including for any modifications of the building’s design. It is unknown to what extent the Reynolds agreement covered topics such as vendor discounts to architects, about which project owners are often leery, with some insisting that they be alerted to any such discounts – and receive a percentage, or even the entirety, of the discount. When the project’s ownership changed hands, Van Alen would have been best served in negotiating an amendment to the existing agreement that would be tailored to the new relationship, covering any previously less relevant issues that would be likely to surface.

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Although he succeeded in obtaining his fee, Van Alen was shamed by the media for suing his patron, considered untoward for architects. Compounded by the Depression, Van Alen would never again be offered any similar commission, and pivoted his career to one teaching sculpting.

CREDITS:

The Bowery Boys: New York City History: Podcast Episode #250, “The Empire State Building: Story of an Icon,” January 11, 2018.

Compan, Lucas, “Top 10 Secrets of the Chrysler Building”, Piccola New Yorker Special Trips.

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“TEN TOPS”, Website of The Skyscraper Museum, ©1997-2025.

Gerometta, Marshall, “The History of Measuring Tall Buildings”, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Neal Bascomb, Higher, Doubleday, 2003.

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Spero, James, The Great Sights of New York, Second, Revised Edition, by Dover Publications, Inc., 1991.

“CHRYSLER LETS CONTRACT”, The New York Times, October 28, 1928.

“Reynolds’s 68-Story Plan Nets $2,500,000 in Sale to Chrysler”, New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1928.

“Approve New Skyscraper”, The New York Times, June 6, 1928.