Skyscraper Building In The 1920s

n early 1870s -1880s commercial high-rise buildings started to appear in Manhattan, New York, and by 1901, several laws were issued to restrict maximum building heights. However, the zoning regulation redefining the entire city were issued in 1916, when New York’s population reached 55 million. Under the 1916 zoning resolution, New York established a new form of regulation that combined restrictions on height, bulk, and land use in one single law. The tall and bulky buildings of the garment industry, blocked sunlight for neighboring buildings and the streets. Accordingly, the government introduced setback requirements, regulating buildings by volume and by the width of the street and the size of the land parcel rather than by height alone.

By the late 1920s, the planners introduced a movement to decrease allowable population and building densities through limiting the expansion of skyscraper districts and making more stringent restrictions on the height and bulk of buildings because of the issues that affected skyscraper planning, regulation, and development such as transportation accessibility, infrastructure adequacy, metropolitan concentration, and other issues .In 1961 New York reviewed its zoning resolution from 1916, in order to implement several innovative techniques for controlling the urban development of skyscrapers through zoning provision for large-scale development to decongest the environment and maintain open space at the ground level and preserve certain land uses that enhance the quality of urban life. The zoning law of 1961 reduced the allowable population density from fifty-five million in the 1916 law to twelve million, and replaced the setback requirements with restrictions based on Floor Area Ratios (FAR) (Wiess, "Skyscraper Zoning: New York's Pioneering Role", 1992, pp.