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130-132 West 42nd Street, Midtown, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
The Bush Tower, designed by the prominent architectural firm of Helmle & Corbett and built in 1916-18 was an influential prototype for set-back skyscrapers, even though it was designed prior to the adoption of the 1916 law mandating the set-back form; the setbacks of the Bush Tower were described by Corbett as a purely architectural and aesthetic solution.
Combining historical neo-Gothic detailing with a modem, pronounced vertical emphasis, the building represents an important intermediate stage in the development of the skyscraper. Secondary elevations finished with an innovative treatment of trompe l'oeil colored brick piers, and the engineering solutions for the tower-like steel-frame building erected on a very narrow plot were features of interest.
Built for the Bush Terminal Company, the Bush Terminal International Exhibit Building and Buyers Club, as the building was originally named, housed merchandise showrooms located for the convenience of out-of-town buyers in midtown Manhattan. Two ten-story wings facing 41st Street, also designed by Helmle & Corbett, continue the simplified neo-Gothic style of the thirty-story tower.
The design of the Bush Tower reflects an important intermediate stage in the development of the skyscraper, a transition from the historically inspired structures built prior to World War I and the post-war towers characterized by vertical articulation. The Bush Tower combines neo-Gothic ornamentation with a pronounced vertical emphasis.
The neo-Gothic street level facade was a refinement of an earlier design, more typical of the period, into a restrained statement where Gothic detailing supported another, more dominant design program. And although Corbett simplified prototypes, most notably the Woolworth Building , and made the Gothic elements enhance his emphasis on verticality, he had yet to take the step that Raymond Hood took in 1923 with the American Radiator Company Building in modernizing the neo-Gothic language.
The domination of historical ornamentation by a vertical emphasis also blurred the classically-inspired traditional division of the tower into thirds, and some vertical lines are carried from base to top. Piers at the street level were carried upward as ribs articulating the main shaft of the tower, and merged, into pinnacles in the Gothic detailing at the top of the building. In Corbett's words, "The whole mass of the building [was], of course, vertical, and everything possible in designing was done to accentuate this vertical ity."
Corbett saw his skyscraper as a "towering mass" with four sides, not an infill tower with one street facade. In 1926, in an article for the Saturday Evening Post, he described the design problem for the layman:
We wanted to make the structure a model for the tall, narrow building in the center of a city block. We were determined it should be a thing complete in itself, with fine, clean uprising lines; a building that could be looked at from every angle, sides and back as well as front, rather than a long peppermint box on end with holes punched in the sides for windows and a stray gumdrop on top by way of a water tank. ...Part of our scheme was an appropriate finish for the top which should give the entire building the appearance of a soaring cathedral tower.
In his three-dimensional approach to the building, the side elevations presented a design challenge; the decision had been made to build to the lot line which prevented the use of windows or projecting architectural elements. The solution, the use of trompe l'oeil piers of colored brick to divide the remaining wall area into vertical sections, was an often imitated device used by tall building designers in New York City. Corbett described the design process:
...the architects made drawings of the side walls as though the building stood free all round with plenty of room for reveals and projections. The drawing was then rendered to shadows at forty-five degrees, the shadows being in dark and the highlights in white. The drawings was then interpreted in brick of buff color for the general field, white for highlights, and black for shadows.
The Bush Tower was predicted, at the time of its construction, to be the last of the skyscrapers due to the adoption of the 1916 zoning ordinance. In fact, Corbett's design soon came to be regarded as a prototype of set-back design, a building of the future rather than of the past.
Although some of his contemporaries suspected that Corbett was thinking of forthcoming set-back requirements when he designed the Bush Tower, the set-back design was a visual choice. Corbett wrote:
The building [was] not, as sometimes supposed, the first example of the new set-back idea resulting from the New York Zoning law. Plans for the building were drawn before the law went into effect. The set-backs were conceived purely for architectural and aesthetic reasons.
...Cutting off six stories at the comers formed the first set-back; setting in the next three... on all sides formed the second. In such ways the building got its finish.
The set-back top story concealed the rooftop water tank and elevator housing unit. This was still a relatively novel idea, and Corbett later related a conversation during which an anonymous client asked:
Hm. What's that gadget on top? looks pretty fancy to me. Any office space in it? What? It contains the water tank and elevator machinery? Holy Smoke! Haven't you got all outdoors to put those things in?
The impact of the Bush Tower design upon an architectural community faced with set-back regulations was considerable. The editor of the American Architect suggested that "certain features of this important structure no doubt suggestively influenced the present
development of the stepped back type of tall buildings." Another observer pictured Corbett in his office on the top floor of the Bush Tower watching the fulfillment of his prophecy as additional set-back towers were constructed.
Many contemporary critics praised the Bush Tower for a variety of aesthetic and practical reasons. In 1926 the building was named "commercial building of the decade" by the American Architect.
That same year the noted architectural historian Talbot Hamlin wrote that the building strikes at the heart of modem sky-scraper design, accepts the problem in its entirety, even to the bare party walls and makes its effect by using precisely the necessary elements: extreme vertical ity to express steel structure, a polychromatic brick patterning of the party walls to make them contribute to the tower-like effect of the whole. At night, when floodlights set the delicate detail of the upper portions agleam, there arises the romance of anew American Beauty.
Corbett himself may have given the building the recognition it properly deserves by placing a photograph of the Bush Tower between those of the Woolworth Building and the Chicago Tribune Tbwer in his essay on architecture in Encyclopaedia Britannica. And in his article on the design of the American Radiator Company Building, Raymond Hood acknowledged the role of the Bush Tower in skyscraper development by citing the influence of Corbett, Goodhue and Saarinen in the advancement of
skyscraper design.
Description
The Bush Tower, a thirty-story building facing on 42nd Street and the ten-story wing extending from the tcwer to 41st Street, is of steel-frame construction with curtain walls of buff brick and terra cotta. The building was constructed by the Thompson-Starrett Company and the South Amboy Terra Cotta Company supplied the terra cotta.Low neighboring structures, and a plaza area to the east reveal all facades of the tcwer and two facades of the wing.
A system of primary and secondary angular ribs articulate the north and south facades of the tall portion of the building that rises unbroken from street level to the twentieth story. The original one-over-one double-hung windows have been replaced with similar units with transoms. Trcntpe l'oeil piers and panels created by the use of lighter and darker brick enrich the secondary elevation walls.
The east side wall is pierced by a one-bay by three-bay light court.
The limestone-faced street facade, the upper portion of which is unaltered, has a tripartite division of openings. Carvings in a nautical theme enrich the corbels, executed by John Donnelly & Co., Inc.,below the third-story simple cornice, punctuated with shields, a motif used in the terra-cotta detailing of the piers and spandrels in the two stories immediately above.
The two-story arched openings of the original design have been altered into square-headed openings framed by limestone-faced piers that join to the original ones above the mezzanine level.
At the top of the shaft, in a transitional area, a band of panels, which is continued unbroken with ribs screening the light court on the east facade, becomes a parapet wall at the comers. Copper lantern pinnacles top the wide, smooth brick piers that extend upward from the street to this height and finials top each rib extending through the parapet on the street facades.
The upper shaft area, above the twentieth story, has angled comer walls filled with paired windows. Ribs continuing up through the street facades resolve in an elongated arched window which is echoed by the edge of balustrade wall enclosing the area above.
The crowning pavilion is set back on all four sides, but repeats the elongated octagonal form of the upper shaft. Above the windows, framed to appear as two-story tall arched windows, blank Gothic tracery divides the roof parapet wall. The copper roof originally was topped by a pair of finials with electric torches at the ends of the gabled ridge.
The portion of the ten-story wing next to the tower is set back to create a light court. On the exposed east side wall of the main portion of the wing trompe l'oeil piers and a band of shield-enriched panels marking the eighth story repeat the design of the tower portion. The exposed portion of the west side wall is buff-colored brick with winders in the sixth and seventh stories.
The 41st Street facade is detailed as the tower facades with angled and flat ribs dividing the window bays. Above the eighth story windows framed by projecting transoms, the ninth story is recessed behind truncated pinnacles at the building comers. The walls of the further recessed tenth-story penthouse have closely-set windows. The limestone faced storefronts are both divided into thirds by piers which support a wide transom with blank Gothic tracery supported by corbel stops in a cast foliate design. The eastern portion of the facade has been covered in modem materials.
The western facade, a secondary entrance to the movie theater, ^^ appears to be the original design although no elevation drawings have been located. The central bay is framed by cast-stone faced piers from which quoins extend on the first story. This bay is nearly filled with wide, arched bronze doors with Gothic tracery slightly recessed in a deep Gothic arch. A shield-bearing lion guards the door in front of a cast-stone sheathed traceried arch which is tied into a blank Gothic tracery transom between the second and third stories. The outer bays have plain, double service doors topped with a cast-stone lintel.
Subsequent History
The lower floors of the building, initially the Buyers' Club, were occupied by the Hamilton Trust Company in the early 1920s and by the Old London Restaurant in 1931. The Bush Terminal Company lost the property to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1938 during foreclosure proceedings.
Alterations to the building have been limited to a series of street-level facade changes reflecting this changing use of the building, and to the insertion of windows between the trompe l'oeil piers in the side walls in 1939.
- From the 1988 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Chelsea Bush is the sole Nashville contestant on ABC's new reality show True Beauty. She stopped by the News 2 newsroom to talk about being on that show and how she feels she's being portrayed unfairly.
Taken on 05 January 2014 in Congo around Makaga Sibiti
freewheely.com: Cycling Africa beyond mountains and deserts until Cape Town
ERIE, Pa.| Former President George W. Bush fired a salvo at President Obama on Wednesday, asserting his administration's interrogation policies were within the law, declaring the private sector -- not government -- will fix the economy and rejecting the nationalization of health care.
"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money."
Repeatedly in his hourlong speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office.
"Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States," he said to huge cheers.
Mr. Bush weighed in on some of the most pressing issues of the day: the election in Iran, the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and his administration's interrogation policies of terrorists held there and elsewhere. The former president has not commented on Mr. Obama's decision to ban "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding, which the current president has called "off course" and "based on fear."
"The way I decided to address the problem was twofold: One, use every technique and tool within the law to bring terrorists to justice before they strike again," he said, adding that the country needs to stay on offense, not defense. On Guantanamo, which while in office Mr. Bush said he wanted to close, the former president was diplomatic.
"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that -- persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."
The Obama administration has started to clear out some of the more than 200 detainees at the facility.
Repeating a mantra from his presidency, he called the current war against terrorism an "ideological conflict," asserting that in the long term, the United States needs to press freedom and democracy in corners across the world
A row of these pretty yellow flowers lines the front of our community library right now - I look forward to them every spring. They're big bushes, 18 inches, and make a real impact.
(Clivia Miniata, but I like Bush Lily better)
Un edificio de oficinas que queda en frente de mi universidad. Me gusta la manera que le ponen la luz azul adentro. Ayer a las 6am aprovechando que no habia nadie tome la foto.
Bush House is a building between Aldwych and The Strand in London at the southern end of Kingsway. It serves as ofices for the BBC's World Serviceand the HM Revenue Customs. The picture was taken at 6am. The Blue light.. well thats how the building is adorned.
Spring!! Flowers!!
We're getting excited over here in So Cal.
We are, after all, the wildflower capital of the world. :-)
Single raw HDR.
Just continuing the Christmas Bush theme - these were all taken a few weeks ago before the colour deepened.
Happy NYE everyone! See you in 2010.
Much love
XX