The Chrysler Build­ing was once the tallest struc­ture in the world — a hey­day that end­ed up last­ing less than a year. The loss of that glo­ri­ous title owed to the com­ple­tion of the Empire State Build­ing, twelve blocks away, in 1931. But it was all in the spir­it of the game, the Chrysler Build­ing hav­ing itself one-upped its close com­peti­tor 40 Wall Street (then called the Bank of Man­hat­tan Trust Build­ing) by installing a non-func­tion­al spire atop its sig­na­ture crown at the last moment. But how­ev­er much of a tri­umph it rep­re­sent­ed, that moment was poor­ly timed: the very next day would bring the Wall Street Crash of 1929, har­bin­ger of the Great Depres­sion. The sub­se­quent decade would inspire lit­tle pub­lic favor for extrav­a­gant mon­u­ments in the Big Apple.

Yet com­pared to the life of a tow­er, eco­nom­ic cycles are short indeed. By now the Chrysler Build­ing has seen the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca through a fair few ups and downs, only gain­ing appre­ci­a­tion all the while. Removed from its imme­di­ate his­tor­i­cal con­text, we can more keen­ly appre­ci­ate archi­tect William Van Alen’s elab­o­rate yet ele­gant Art Deco design.

In the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er takes us on a tour of that design, explain­ing how each of its fea­tures works with the oth­ers to make an endur­ing visu­al impact. Some, like the gleam­ing over­sized radi­a­tor-cap gar­goyles, impress with sheer brazen­ness; oth­ers, like the Native Amer­i­can-derived pat­terns that repeat in var­i­ous loca­tions at var­i­ous scales, take a more prac­ticed eye to iden­ti­fy.

Despite hav­ing been sur­passed in height over and over again, the Chrysler Build­ing remains a sine qua non of under­stand­ing the New York sky­scraper. Hence its appear­ance at the very begin­ning of “Why New York’s Sky­scrap­ers Keep Chang­ing Shape” from The B1M. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured that chan­nel here on Open Cul­ture for its inves­ti­ga­tion of why there are so few sky­scrap­ers in Europe; in New York, how­ev­er, the ambi­tious­ly tall build­ing has become some­thing like a force of nature, tamed only tem­porar­i­ly even by cri­sis or dis­as­ter. Some have used the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic to declare an end of the office build­ing, even the end of the city, and much like ear­ly in the Depres­sion, sky­scrap­ers now under con­struc­tion reflect the pri­or­i­ties of a pre­vi­ous real­i­ty. Yet the 92-year-old Chrysler Build­ing con­tin­ues to inspire us today, and to that extent, we still live in the world that made it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Chrysler Build­ing, New York’s Art Deco Mas­ter­piece, by John Malkovich (1994)

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

A Whirl­wind Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of the New York Pub­lic Library — “Hid­den Details” and All

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

More than a mil­len­ni­um and a half after its fall, we still look back with won­der on the accom­plish­ments of the ancient Roman Empire. Few ele­ments of its lega­cy impress us as much as its built envi­ron­ment — or in any case, what’s left of its built envi­ron­ment. Still, the fact that any­thing remains at all of the struc­tures built by the Romans tells us that they were doing some­thing right: specif­i­cal­ly, they were doing con­crete right. Just how they made that aston­ish­ing­ly durable build­ing mate­r­i­al has been a sub­ject of research even in recent years, and we even fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture back in 2017. But could we make Roman con­crete today?

Such is the task of Shawn Kel­ly, host of the Youtube chan­nel Cor­po­ral’s Cor­ner, in the video above. Using mate­ri­als like vol­canic ash, pumice and lime­stone, he makes a brick that looks more than sol­id enough to go up against any mod­ern con­crete.

As of this writ­ing, this sim­ple video has racked up more than three mil­lion views, a num­ber that reflects our endur­ing fas­ci­na­tion with the ques­tion of how the ancient Romans cre­at­ed their world — as well as the ques­tion addressed in the high­er-tech Prac­ti­cal Engi­neer­ing video below, “Was Roman Con­crete Bet­ter?”

The fact of the mat­ter is that, despite pos­sess­ing tech­nolo­gies the Romans could hard­ly have imag­ined, their con­crete lasts longer than ours. Why that should be the case comes down, in large part, to water: we put a great deal more of it into our con­crete than the Romans did, in order to pour it more cheap­ly and eas­i­ly. But this makes it more frag­ile and sub­ject to dete­ri­o­ra­tion over time (as seen in the ear­ly dilap­i­da­tion of cer­tain Bru­tal­ist build­ings), even despite our use of chem­i­cal addi­tives and steel rein­force­ment. Roman con­crete was also mixed with sea­wa­ter, which caused the for­ma­tion of crys­tals with­in the mate­r­i­al that actu­al­ly strength­ened it as it aged — thus cement­ing, as one wag in the com­ments puts it, the Romans’ place in his­to­ry.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.