First Skyscrapers: Skyscraper Firsts Symposium

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) is the world’s premier authority on tall buildings, maintaining the internationally-accepted criteria for measuring height, and determining the “World’s Tallest Building.” In 2019, the Council celebrates its 50th anniversary in its home city of Chicago, where it will also be holding its 10th World Congress, from 29 October to 2 November, on the theme “50 Forward: 50 Back”. As part of this event, CTBUH and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) will host an important one-day symposium on Thursday, 31 October, entitled “First Skyscrapers: Skyscraper Firsts.”

The purpose of the Symposium is to identify the ground-breaking achievements in the formative years of the skyscraper, and to separate popular myth from settled scholarship in the debate over “the first skyscraper.” The tall commercial building developed through an evolutionary process across numerous projects. One aim of the Symposium is to discuss and debate the many candidates for “first skyscraper,” depending on differing criteria or categories of innovation: e.g., First Tall Building with an All-Iron Frame, or First Complete Curtain Wall. In addition, the term “skyscraper” – the romantic, even poetic, term for tall buildings – can and should be defined by more characteristics than height, vertical transportation, or structural systems. A broader aim of the symposium, then, is also to clarify a definition of “skyscraper.”

ctbuh2019.com/first/program/synopsis