The Wainwright Building Is the First Skyscraper That Looks Like One

The first skyscraper that looks like one is the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, finished in 1891. The building in Chicago that usually gets the credit came earlier, but it did not yet look like a skyscraper; it looked like an ordinary masonry office block stretched upward.

The column on Chestnut Street

At the corner where Chestnut meets Seventh, the Wainwright stands ten stories in red brick and terracotta. The base is two stories tall, plain and wide enough to plant the building in the ground. Above the base the piers begin, and they do not stop. They run the full ten stories without a horizontal break, past floor after floor, with the windows tucked between them in a regular, patient rhythm. At the top a frieze of darker openings and a heavy cornice bring the whole climb to a close. The building has three acts: a base, a shaft, a crown. It reads as a column, not as a stack of separate floors.

That arrangement was an argument, not a decorative preference. A tall building with a steel frame could have worn the old masonry grammar, one cornice per floor, every story its own little building, a wall that admitted nothing about the steel inside. That is what many of the first tall buildings in American cities did. Adler & Sullivan turned the order upside down. They let the frame's logic find the surface. The thick piers mark the hidden steel columns. The base holds the lobby and the public entrance. The middle floors are the anonymous working rooms, and the frieze and cornice give the building a single decisive end. Years later, when Sullivan set down his theory of the tall office building, he described that tripartite shape as the one honest form for a tall building. The Wainwright had already been the proof.

And the proof was visible from the street. The first tall buildings often announced their height as a horizontal fact, piling one familiar floor on top of another, so that the eye read them as columns of separate houses. The Wainwright is the opposite. From the curb, on a rainy St. Louis afternoon, the eye climbs the piers without finding a place to rest. The windows are businesslike and set deep between the verticals. The building does not strain to be picturesque. It spends its energy going up. The cornice is not trim; it is the period at the end of a long vertical sentence. A person who has never heard of Louis Sullivan can still see the difference: this is not a tall box with windows in it. It is a tower that admits to being a tower.

Steel came first; the wrecking ball came later

The strongest case against the Wainwright begins in Chicago. Chicago had the Home Insurance Building, with a metal frame, built a few years before the Wainwright, and a skyscraper cannot be separated from its structure. It is not primarily a style; it is a way of keeping a tall building standing. The Home Insurance walls held up nothing but themselves. By that standard, the Wainwright is not the first skyscraper. It is the first skyscraper with good posture. The metal skeleton that makes the Wainwright possible was already in the air, and Sullivan was drawing on a system someone else had used first. If the word is an engineering term, Chicago wins.

Except the Wainwright almost did not live long enough to argue the point. In the 1970s, after decades of offices moving outward and downtowns losing their old reasons to exist, the building was old and small and in the way. St. Louis was not alone in tearing out old blocks for parking; it happened in every American city. The Wainwright was marked for something like that. What stopped it was the state of Missouri, which bought the building and put office workers inside. The building did not become a marble monument; it became a working building again. People walked past it carrying briefcases and stood in its shadow at noon. The old verticals did not need to be announced. They were there, holding up the ordinary daylight of a state office.

Chicago's early claimant no longer stands. The Wainwright does. That matters more than pedigree. The building can be approached, entered, looked at from the curb; its claim is not just a photograph. And the parking lot that nearly took it is one more American might-have-been, except that the state showed up in time. The debate over what counted as first is still a debate; the building itself is not. The piers still run to the cornice without stopping, and the frieze still cuts the sky above Chestnut.

Wainwright State Office Building

Photos: w_lemay (CC BY-SA 2.0)