The skyscraper has generated a seemingly endless flow of scholarly work, a flow that shows no indication of ebbing. Monographs have detailed single buildings or the oeuvre of prominent skyscraper architects; other texts have brought focus to the technologies, the finances, or the artistic depictions of these tall structures. A museum in New York devoted to the skyscraper has even been created, offering actual and virtual exhibitions and material about the tall building, from its origins to its most contemporary examples (www.skyscraper.org).

A building type that is essentially of our time, a monument to modernity and capitalism, the skyscraper has held both popular and scholarly interest—a quality only heightened after the events of September 11, which confirmed and perhaps further enhanced the stature of the World Trade Center towers as symbols of technological and financial prowess, and as potent markers on the skyline of New York, the United States, and the modern world. Daniel M. Abramson’s Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street focuses on an earlier era of lower Manhattan’s financial district by detailing the design, construction, and use of four skyscrapers built there in the 1920s and 1930s. A beautiful book, oversized and lavishly illustrated, Skyscraper Rivals is one of a small group of studies that views the skyscraper holistically, and therein lies the book’s greatest accomplishment. Abramson and his work are clearly situated within architectural history, yet without apology he considers technology, business management, and social history within his purview. Like historian Olivier Zunz in his Making America Corporate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Abramson has identified within the skyscraper a complex and engaging story that lies at the intersection of business and architectural history. His presentation of this broad picture is commendable and instructive.

Directed to both scholars and the general reader, this book endeavors to provide both a detailed monographic presentation of four buildings—the Cities Services Building (now AIG Building), One Wall Street, 40 Wall Street, and the City Bank Farmers Trust Building—as well as an overview of this period’s skyscraper design, construction, and usage, with specialized details and formal analyses of plans, facades, and interiors. To give a complete history of the buildings, Abramson creates eight topical chapters devoted to clients, architects, planning, construction, technology, exterior aesthetics, interior design, and daily uses and users. A preface by Carol Willis, creator and director of the Skyscraper Museum, and an introduction by the author specify the nature and organization of the project, and a brief postscript brings the study up to the present day.

Other components of the book serve as valuable informational supplements. Footnotes and the index are thorough and cleanly designed. A bibliography organized by chapter topics, and a clear numerical listing of illustrations, intellectual roadmaps frequently absent from texts intended for general readership, are also provided. The illustrations, by virtue of their number, form a significant portion of the book’s content. More than 175 images include maps, postcards, promotional materials, renderings, plans, and historical and contemporary photographs, all from diverse sources. The images bear substantial captions and credits, and serve multiple purposes: they make the book visually appealing, they provide a substantial source of information that complements the text, and they are suggestive of the broad range of evidence that may be brought to skyscraper studies.

The compilation under one cover of such a diversity of evidence on skyscraper building is laudable. Likewise, a specific focus on the building boom of late 1920s America is a much-wanted sequel to the many publications that focus on an earlier, heroic era of skyscraper building in Chicago. However, the book’s effectiveness is somewhat compromised by its literary identity crisis: it is at once a coffee table book and a scholarly text, and it is a monograph four times over as well as a general survey. In the introduction, Abramson explains the evolution of the project: it is at first a study of the AIG (originally Cities Services) Building, which then broadened to include its three main “skyscraper rivals” to make “a composite portrait of Wall Street’s skyscraper development in the 1920s and 1930s” (4). As a monograph of a single building, topical chapters would have been a logical means of dividing material related by a single building project. Even a “composite portrait” could be assembled in this manner. But the division of four building projects, plus a general overview of skyscraper design, building, and usage conventions into eight topical categories, leaves the reader with an enticing collection of fragments that must be rearranged to comprehend the individual building histories. In short, the organization that the author may have decided upon for his initial project does not serve his revised agenda.

The quadrupling of the monographic approach has other problems. It creates an unevenness in a text that, like a zoom lens gone awry, ranges from minute details to summary statements. In a monograph, the single object of inquiry may be used as a case study to demonstrate aspects of the summary text. But with four buildings, that relationship between specific and general is disrupted, and the burden of constructing a story line is placed squarely on the reader. It would have been far more satisfying to read a more detailed study of the Cities Services Company and its building project; for example, the material provided about the company and its founder, Henry L. Doherty, leaves one wanting to know more about the workings of the company and the relationship between top executives, the architect, and the resulting building.

Admittedly, some confusion in dealing with the four buildings selected is unavoidable: each has undergone multiple name changes during the past seventy years. The Cities Services Building is now called the AIG Building; 40 Wall Street was also known as the Manhattan Company Building and is now called the Trump Building, and so on. In addition, two of the buildings have similar names: 40 Wall Street and One Wall Street. Abramson attempts to control the inevitable confusion by stating that he will use the buildings’ original names. Yet he breaks this commitment to subtitle the entire volume with a current building name, the AIG Building, a choice that he does not explain.

There are other questions that arise as one moves through the text. At the outset, Abramson identifies the Cities Services Buildings’ three major rivals as the next three tallest structures in the financial district, without explaining why he is satisfied with height alone as a barometer of rivalry. Once the author has stated his selection of buildings, a simple map indicating the location of the four skyscrapers, and a skyline or aerial view with the four buildings clearly marked with arrows, would establish geographical relationships and set the stage for the detailed information that follows. Given the book’s richness and diversity of illustration, these omissions are puzzling, and again place an undue burden on the reader. The sprinkling of quotations from Le Corbusier seem gratuitous (and for the lay reader, completely inexplicable), and would benefit from some explanatory text in a footnote. There is a great emphasis on the disjuncture between the design education of 1920s architects and their real-world task of managing firms and making skyscrapers. Abramson implies that sitting at the cusp of modernism, this generation of architects acquired degrees in a discipline steeped in historic monuments and grand ceremonial spaces, only to be thrust unprepared into the businesslike office of the architectural firm and the task of designing for the business-driven client. While there is some validity to this assertion, historical perspective here would be useful. The architects of the late nineteenth century—Sullivan, Burnham and Root, and Flagg, to name a few—also grappled with reconciling historically-based design solutions and business requirements. Whether Ecole- or shop-trained, they were stretching to bring an aesthetic and an organizational sense to a new building type. That earlier generation does not even make a cameo appearance in Abramson’s text. It is also hard to read this segment without thinking of contemporary architectural education, which in many schools focuses primarily on theory and “pure” design, fully believing that gritty reality will greet the designer when he or she emerges from the academy into the real world of actual building. And because architectural education, the architect, and building design are closely related, some material in these areas appears in more than one chapter.

Skyscraper Rivals is not greater than the sum of its parts. But it has many valuable pieces, including well-written summary texts that come close to providing the composite view of 1920s and 1930s Wall Street it promises. It is a well-designed text that delivers both high-quality visual and scholarly material. Most valuable, however, is its premise, evident at first glance, that the skyscraper is a complex project that derives from, and exists in, an environment shaped by money, design trends, technology, and, above all, by people.