Head to 1920s New York. The post-World War I era was the time of the enthusiasm of the victors, carried by the insolent health of the American economy. These are the famous Roaring Twenties, the Roaring Twenties. The United States is now the world’s leading power and the scene of all the great innovations, such as the car, aviation, chemicals, telephone, etc. Innovations driven by flourishing fortunes and empires, such as that of Walter P. Chrysler, founder of the automobile company of the same name. A power that he chooses to realize with the construction of a building in Manhattan, at the height of his career, which will have to be the highest in New York, and incidentally beat the record for the Eiffel Tower (324 meters).
Ephemeral toit of New York
He finds his architect in the person of William Van Alen (1883-1954), which then delivers a monument to him that meets his expectations: from the top of its 77 floors, it exceeds 300 meters in height and ends in a pyramidal point. The reason for this fantasy? The urban plan, which then imposed since 1916, the removal of the upper floors, to allow sunlight to reach the streets. This rule has generated ” cinstructions in the form of needles or wedding cakes’, Pauline Peretz, historian of the United States in the 20th century, told our colleagues in Release in 2011. The Chrysler Building is then capped with arcs of circles superimposed on each other and which narrow as they climb.
A pyramid that creates the illusion of a building taller than it is, dressed in small triangles, which would evoke a crown, a sun or for some of the wheels of a car. Because the Chrysler Building truly embodies the reign of the machine, and especially that of the automobile. In addition to a frieze of hubcaps, there are corners decorated with eagle-shaped radiator caps, the arrow is draped in a stainless steel facing which is reminiscent of the chrome of the first cars.
Parisian Art Deco, an absolute model for the Chrysler Building
« The car is truly the symbol of Art Deco. It expresses the vitality of the time like the airplane », Says Emmanuel Bréon, curator at Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine and specialist in Art Deco. It is on the other side of the Atlantic that the Americans come to pick up this movement, during the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925 in Paris, to establish it permanently in the United States. Van Alen, for his part, took in the air of France even before the First World War. ” He’s a little fellow from the Beaux Arts, his teacher is Victor Laloux, the architect of the Orsay station, like most American architects who came to study in Paris… ” It is this same Laloux who trained the entire generation of architects to whom we owe ” these Art Deco skyscrapers of New York and Chicago erected in the early 1920s ”, specifies Emmanuel Bréon.
Our Chrysler Building is a little Parisian? One thing is certain, the building is also a bit Egyptian, with the sumptuous lotus flowers, which adorn the doors of its elevators. It must be said that ancient Egypt is a real component of Art Deco, suggested by the discovery in 1922, of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun and its treasures. An inspiration at the height of the tower, whose vertical record was relatively short.
Less than a year after its inauguration, the Chrysler Building has had its hair styled by the Empire State Building, 62 meters higher, immortalized by the cult film “King Kong ». But the Chrysler Tower does not have to be ashamed of its 77 floors, which will also appear on small and large screens, as in “Sex and the City”, “Men In Black”, and will be reduced to pieces in “Armageddon “Or in” Godzilla “.
More recently, this “Little gem” as Emmanuel Bréon calls it, also offered an appearance in the parade Louis Vuitton 2020 cruise, through a minaudière, taking up the hat of one of the most coquettish towers in Manhattan …
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