The Art World: Flatiron-size skyscrapers?

NEW YORK, May 23 (UPI) -- Since the destruction of the Twin Towers by airborne terrorists there has been serious discussion of limiting buildings to less-than-target tallness, possibly reverting to the more human dimension of one of the earliest and most famous skyscrapers, New York's Flatiron Building.

The 21-story tower resembling the prow of a ship occupies a triangle at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23rd Street and is celebrating its centennial this year. It wasn't even the tallest building in New York when it was completed in 1902, the Park Row Building being 136 feet taller, but it felt comfortable in height to the passerby.

By 1908, the 47-story Singer Building (since torn down) had overshadowed the Park Row Building and was soon itself soon to be outranked in height by such skyscrapers as the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and eventually the World Trade Center towers, 110 stories each and 1,350 feet high.

Even these towers of tragic memory were to be outranked as the world's highest by the Sears Tower in Chicago, and ultimately by the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, completed in 1997 at a height of 1,483 feet. Perhaps it is time to let Malaysia have the last word in skyscrapers.

If there is one thing the planners for redevelopment of the World Trade Center site are agreed on, it is that there will be no new buildings built as tall as the Twin Towers. There is talk of 50-story towers more in line with the Rockefeller Center complex of buildings dominated by the 70-story GE building, formerly known as the RCA building.

No. 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story building destroyed last Sept. 11, is being replaced by a 52-story building, already under construction. But hasn't the city enough 50-story buildings?

There are several hundred of them, many looking as though they were punched out by the same International Style cookie cutter. The argument in their favor is that the cost of real estate is so high in New York that only the rents from a building of at least 50 stories can guarantee investors a return on their money.

Ask Donald Trump. He is the greatest believer in the Manhattan real estate adage that there is nowhere to go but up for a profit. The city has him to thank for the year-old 90-story, tinted glass Trump World Tower, which Trump boastfully advertises as the world's highest apartment building. It hovers ominously over the United Nations neighborhood like a dark tombstone.

Trump may be right. He usually is. But the city and state could make tax deals with the owners of the World Trade Center site that would persuade them to rebuild at a lower height. Then the City Council might look into legislature limiting the height of buildings as Paris, Rome, and some other world-class cities have done for years.

The Flatiron building would look just right in Paris, even though it is even taller than that city's building code allows. It was designed by Chicago-based architect Daniel Burnham in the French Beaux-Arts style to fit a wedge-shaped plot already known as the Flatiron because it resembles the shape of an old-fashioned, stove-heated iron.

Its beauty has always been admired, and its power to amaze has never diminished.

Author H. G. Wells was the first to describe it as having the look and proud bearing of a magnificent ocean liner sailing up Fifth Avenue, and the uptown views across Madison Square from its prow-end offices are among the best in the city. The exterior limestone stonework and fussy terra cotta detailing were restored 10 years ago.

The building's centennial is being celebrated by the New-York Historical Society with an exhibition of photographs including Alfred Steiglitz's famous studies of the building in all sorts of weather, paintings, drawings, prints, songs, poems, and souvenirs such as beer mugs, cast iron banks, commemorative spoons, and postcards. Titled "Building on the Flatiron," it will run through Sept. l.

One of the legends that clings to the building at 23rd Street is that it gave rise to the shout "23 Skidoo" used by police to disperse idle young men who congregated in the shadow of the structure to see the wind sweep up Broadway and raise women's skirts. It is a legend based in truth, as a 1906 newspaper cartoon of policemen shouting at the men proves.

The building now houses a number of prestigious publishing firms including St. Martin's Press and Springer Verlag. It was given landmark status by the city in 1966, which should protect it from any drastic changes. But the promise that the Flatiron Building announced a century ago to a world giddy with excitement about living on the threshold of a new millennium without technological limits looks far less promising today.

Since Sept. 11 there has been a feeling of foreboding resulting from the realization that the competition to build the tallest building on earth, now more than a century old, is based in human arrogance, the kind that invites festering jealousy on the part of the have-nots of this world. Cities such as New York, Realtors, and architects are under the gun to come up with some answer to the question of whether this competition will continue.