Quotes from John Tauranac

The Fifth Avenue Association awarded the Empire State Building its gold medal for design, which was "architecturally excellent from top to bottom.

In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers selected the Empire State Building as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in America's history—the only wonder conceived, financed, owned, and managed by private industry.3

A skyscraper is a tall building whose weight is supported by a frame of steel or poured-in-place concrete with steel reinforcements. Unlike the load-bearing walls of a masonry structure, walls do not help support the average skyscraper.

The average skyscraper is likewise supported by a skeleton, of steel. Its skin, or walls, are supported by the frame; they do not support the building. When the wall of a skyscraper is pricked, it leaks air, and unless its skeleton has suffered a seriously deleterious blow, the building does not fall down.

In the opinion of architects such as Harvey Wiley Corbett, skyscrapers were America's great gift to architecture, the first new structural form since the ancient Romans

It was the Romans who devised the second new structural element—the masonry arch and dome—and used it on a grand scale.

There are 10 million bricks in the building, 27 miles of main and counterweight rails used for the tracks of the elevators, about 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. The completed building contains 37 million cubic feet. The 210 columns at the base support the entire weight of the building.

They needed contractors whose reputations were unsullied, builders who were honest and could get the job done as promised. The directors asked five builders to appear before them in Smith's office in the Biltmore Hotel to discuss the job and to make proposals.

During World War I, Paul Starrett formed Starrett & Goss, which built steamships for the government. By the time Starrett Bros. & Eken was formed in 1922, Paul had already built Macy's to the designs of De Lemos & Cordes; Pennsylvania Station and the Main Post Office to the designs of McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore's Biltmore Hotel, where the meeting with the Empire State's directors would decide their fate.

In 1929 the firm received their largest project to date, the one that might have won the day for them on the Empire State project—they built the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street, which was pitted against Chrysler in the race for the world's tallest. The foundations were started in May 1928, before the site was entirely cleared; less than a year later, the bank moved in. The seventy-story, 927-foot-high building was completed in eleven months.

When asked how long they thought the Empire State job would take to build, Paul Starrett said that they could tear down the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and finish the new building in eighteen months. He also said that their fee for all this would be insignificant compared with the amount of money the corporation would save by having the construction completed in such a short time.

Less than two weeks after the selection of the architects had been made, the directors awarded the building contract to Starrett Bros. & Eken.

By the 1920s, the skyline had replaced the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of the city. New Yorkers pointed to the skyline as their pride and joy

The step from using steel for strengthening masonry to using steel to carry the masonry might not seem enormous, but, as Harvey Wiley Corbett pointed out in The New York Times, Buffington's step was the single most momentous discovery in the history of building since the days of Rome. Architecture was freed from the shackles of stone weight and was made flexible. Buildings

Who made the first graphic depiction of the Empire State Building depends on who's telling the story, but either Raskob or Lamb pulled out a big pencil and held it skyward.

By the 1890s, New York was catching up with Chicago, and true skyscrapers were being erected. The city had the twenty-four-story St. Paul Building on Broadway at Fulton Street, and the twenty-six-story American Surety Building at 100 Broadway (the Bank of Tokyo Building in 1995, and still standing). By the end of the 1890s, New York City had the tallest skyscraper in the world, the now largely ignored Park Row Building at 15 Park Row—a 29-story building

In September 1929, just as the architects were getting down to work on this unprecedented building program, management set a date that seemed unrealistically early—May 1, 1931. That date gave the architects a year and nine months in which to design the building and to oversee its construction.

The reason for the greater number of crosstown streets than up- and downtown avenues was self-evident to planners of the early nineteenth century but might not be so obvious to us today—intra-Manhattan commerce flowed east and west. In the days before railroads, dirigibles, and airplanes, the preeminent form of long-distance transportation and hauling was by water, and the piers and wharves along the East River had to link up with those along the Hudson if commerce was to flourish.

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

Since the units were self-supporting, there was no need for thick walls to support the load of the building. As a result, large expanses of windows punctuated by delicate cast-iron columns created a rhythmic balance outside and well-lit spaces inside.

The idea that finally turned the tide for the architects, the notion that made everything fall in place, was to set the elevators in a central core, which would allow the Empire State Building to provide rentable space that was well lit. From that point forward, they were home free—the solutions were at hand.

Elisha Graves Otis had demonstrated an elevator at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that had a safety device that prevented it from falling if the cable broke.3 In the cast-iron Haughwout Building on Broadway at Broome Street, where china and cutlery were sold, Otis installed the first of his passenger safety-elevators

The core of the building would be used to house the requisite utilities; the rentable office space, assured of light, would surround the core.

The basic plan of the building was reached in four weeks.