Manhattan Municipal Building

The Municipal Building is an urban ( municipal = urban ) administrative building in the far south of the New York district of Manhattan. It was built from 1907 to 1914. The architect was William M. Kendall.

As 1898 wholesale New York was created, it was deemed necessary to create a new administrative headquarters, which should be done with this huge city and therefore should itself take considerable size. There were at that time in the architecture a movement that called itself, City Beautiful ' and had emerged from the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. The aim of this exercise was to give especially the now emerging administrative buildings of major cities an appropriate aesthetic to also act thus exemplary for the other building can. They knew that now in the age of fast -growing cities, the houses would rapidly become larger and they wanted here in time to enforce some aesthetic principles, before it was too late. In the European Art Nouveau there were quite similar trends. This idea is still playing at one of the historic buildings of next importance, the Equitable Building a serious role.

The Municipal Building is not a simple block, but bent, more specifically, the two outer components are tilted by 45 degrees forward so that the outermost part at right angles to the middle section.

Here is the elaborate design of the tip, which had already established itself in the New York high-rise construction as a tradition, still increased a lot by a tower group was placed over the center of the building block that reveals significant similarity to Gothic Fialengruppierungen, but here with classic forms works. The area underneath is also decorated with elements of the Renaissance.

This vacillation between Neoclassicism and Gothic Revival is characteristic of the first skyscraper generation. In the early 20th century it played in Manhattan in these high-rise buildings, a similar argument as from one hundred years earlier in Europe. Decades later, one will no longer be held in New York on the traditional European art history, but here we did not.

The New York skyscraper architecture that actually partially related to the Classical antiquity with its pillars scheme, the Municipal Building, especially in a strange construction is clearly a colonnade arrangement on the ground level, connecting the two protruding exterior components of the building and thus something including a patio creates.

This Municipal Building of 1907-1914 has had a significant impact in a completely different city, namely in Moscow. It is Joseph Stalin have so impressed that he took it as a model of the Moscow State University from 1947 to 1952. The architecture of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union has so just taken on a building an example of the class enemy.