Flatiron by day, NYC

Flatiron by day, NYC

The Flatiron Building, or Fuller Building as it was originally called, is located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the borough of Manhattan, and is considered to be one of the first skyscrapers ever built. Upon completion in 1902 it was one of the tallest buildings in New York City. The building sits on a triangular island block at 23rd Street, Fifth Avenue, and Broadway, anchoring the south (downtown) end of Madison Square.The neighborhood around the building is called the Flatiron District after its signature building, which has become an icon of New York.
The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style. Unlike New York’s early skyscrapers, which took the form of towers arising from a lower, blockier mass, such as the contemporary Singer Building (1902-08), the Flatiron Building epitomizes the Chicago school conception: like a classical Greek column, its limestone and glazed terra-cotta façade is divided into a base, shaft and capital. Early sketches by Daniel Burnham show a design with an (unexecuted) clockface and a far more elaborate crown than in the actual building. Burnham, though he maintained overall control of the design process, was not directly connected with the details of the structure as built; credit should be shared with his designer Frederick P. Dinkelberg (c 1859—1935), a Pennsylvania-born architect in Burnham’s office, who first worked for Burnham at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Working drawings for the Flatiron Building, however, remain to be located, though renderings published at the time of construction in American Architect and The Architectural Record.Since it employed a steel skeleton, building to 22 stories was relatively simple. It was a technique familiar to the Fuller Company, a contracting firm based in Chicago with ties to Burnham and considerable expertise in building such tall structures.At the vertex, the triangular tower is only 6.5 feet (2 m) wide; viewed from above, this ‘pointy’ end of the structure describes an acute angle of about 25 degrees. The strong downdrafts in this area were reputed to raise women’s skirts as they passed. New York’s Flatiron Building was not the first building of its triangular ground-plan: aside from a possibly unique triangular Roman temple built on a similarly constricted site in the city of Verulam, Britannia, both the Gooderham Building of Toronto, built in 1892, and the 1897 English-American Building in Atlanta predate it. Both, however, are smaller than their New York counterpart.
Source: Wikipedia