Chrysler Building
A 77-floor stainless steel skyscraper on 42nd Street in Manhattan, crowned by a seven-story ornamental stainless steel cap with radiating sunburst arches. The building's facade incorporates chrome-nickel steel gargoyles modeled on Chrysler automobile hood ornaments, brick work patterned after radiator grilles, and eagle head ornaments at the 61st floor derived from the Chrysler hood mascot. The crown's Nirosta stainless steel — a material that had never been used on a building facade — was assembled in secret inside the building and raised through the roof in 90 minutes.
The Chrysler Building held the world's tallest building record for 11 months before being surpassed by the Empire State Building and remains the finest surviving example of Art Deco skyscraper design, representing the moment when the American skyscraper found its own aesthetic vocabulary separate from European modernism. The race between Van Alen for Chrysler and H. Craig Severance for 40 Wall Street — each trying to build higher in secret — was the last great "height race" before strict zoning regulations eliminated such individual ambitions.
Completed in May 1930, seven months after the stock market crash that began the Great Depression, the Chrysler Building was a monument to the prosperity and hubris of the 1920s completed at the moment of their collapse. Walter Chrysler financed the construction personally rather than through his automobile company, intending it as a monument to himself and his industry. The building's automotive ornament made it an advertisement for modernity at the precise moment modernity was being called into question.