History management lessons The race to the sky of the State Building Empire

This summer, we relive a feat of the past every week to learn a management lesson.

While the great depression settled, the highest skyscraper on the planet was built in 13 months.A feat of logistics as much as architecture.

L’année : 1929
L’objectif : bâtir le plus haut édifice du monde
Le défi de gestion : 20 mois pour faire la conception, démolir l’édifice existant et ériger le nouveau
La leçon : on n’atteint le sommet qu’en coordonnant les efforts dès le départ

In 1929, the superlatives collided.

While we were about to build the highest skyscraper in the world, the greatest economic crisis of the century struck.

At the end of the 1920s, two American automobile magnate had undertaken a vertical race in New York: who, between Walter Chrysler, founder of Chrysler Corporation, and John Jakob Raskob, who had just left the senior managementGeneral Motors, would erect the highest skyscraper from the city, therefore from the planet, and perhaps, who knows, from the universe.

The idea came from Alfred Smith, former New York State governor, who convinced his rich friends John Jakob Raskob and Pierre S.of the bridge, above president of Dupont and GM, to join him in a major real estate project.

They formed the Empire State Consortium Inc.And, at the end of August 1929, they made public their intention to build the highest skyscraper in the world.

It was Raskob, without more real estate experience than his partners, who took the project in hand.

Dès septembre, la firme Shreve, Lamb and Harmon obtenait le contrat d’architecture, qui spécifiait que l’édifice devait être inauguré le 1^er mai 1931.

They were 20 months before them.

The architect William F.LAMB has used the techniques proven for 30 years on large buildings: a skeleton in beams and steel columns, dressed in non -load -bearing curtain walls.

It was simply a question of building higher.

At what point ?

Legend has it that Raskob has tightened a pencil in Lamb asking him what height he could reach without everything collapsed.

The Woolworth Building, world champion since 1913 with its 241 m and its 60 floors, was going to be beaten in early 1930 by the Manhattan Company Building, which announced 283 m and 70 floors.

Raskob first believed that 80 floors would be enough to win the title, but the 77 -story chrysler building, whose construction had started in 1928, was equipped with an arrow that pointed to 319 meters.

Raskob has adjusted its target to 85 floors, a size that would ensure the Empire State Building a meager advantage of a few meters on its competitor.To easily establish its supremacy, the building would be surmounted by a mooring tower for the airships, carrying the total to 102 floors and 381 m.

Like the Chrysler Building, although in a less ostentatious way, the State Building Empire would adopt the Art Deco style.

The design was guided by the budget and the schedule.

The promoters estimated the cost of building a cube foot, to fix the volume of the building, with a single rule of three, at 36 million cubic feet.

The promoters, the architects, the site manager and the main entrepreneurs trained a committee which participated from the start in the design of the building.

Everyone contributed to their specialty to provide technical solutions, often innovative, to the challenges posed by the gigantism of the building.

Lamb changed his plans 16 times before the final design was fixed.

La gestion du chantier a été confiée à la firme Starrett Brothers & Eken.

Its president convinced Empire State Inc.To trust him by supporting that the firm did not even have a peak and a shovel, but that it would buy or make equipment suitable specifically to this titanic task.

Le 1^er octobre 1929 a commencé le démantèlement du vénérable hôtel Waldorf-Astoria, sur le site duquel le nouveau gratte-ciel serait érigé.

Three weeks later, on October 24, New York suffered the black Thursday, the starting point for the Great Depression.

While dismantling progressed, orders for equipment had gone to suppliers, with specific specifications on quantities, dimensions, weight and date of delivery.

The demolition was completed on March 12, 1930.Five days later, the first steel pillars of the foundation were set up.

Now it was a question of building quickly.

And this is where the coordination of the committee showed its effects.

Thousands of entrepreneurs in around sixty specialties have been hired.

Quelque 57 400 tonnes d’acier de charpente, 6400 fenêtres, 10 millions de briques et 200 000 pi³de granite et de calcaire ont été commandés.

The steel beams and columns, made in Pittsburgh steelworks, 600 km away, were delivered barely 80 hours after their rolling, sometimes still hot!Every morning, these pieces of steel were waiting on the west bank of the Hudson river, ready to cross the river, at the precise moment when they would be necessary.

The speed of erection was - literally - vertiginous.

More than 100 meters high, some workers were seated in caliphon on the beams worn by cranes, to temporarily bolt them on the columns of steel as soon as they were in position.The riveting teams then entered the scene in groups of four.A first man heated a rivet in red, then launched him to a colleague who inserted him with pliers in an assembly hole.A third maintained the rivet in place while the fourth crushed its other end with a pneumatic hammer.

All this in precarious balance on the beams and a few planks, without the shadow of a harness or a security barrier.

Among them, we had hundreds of Kahnawake Mohawks, who had made a great reputation for work in height since they had been engaged for the construction of a railway bridge over the St. Lawrence, in 1886.

As the erection progresses, the facades were lined with stones, bricks, stainless steel and windows, a dozen stages under the most recent level built.

To accelerate the work, temporary elevators brought workers on the job.

By preparing concrete on site in two miniature factories, a concrete parade was avoided to be blocked in New York traffic.

As soon as a concrete slab was sunk, a small narrow track system was deployed to distribute the equipment more quickly on the floor.

In short, each man and each material were in the place necessary at the right time.

The erection of the frame was made in 23 weeks, at the rate of about four floors per week.

Les façades ont été entièrement parées le 13 novembre 1930, 17 jours en avance sur l’échéance du 1^er décembre.

Meanwhile, the interior design and the installation of mechanical and electrical systems had been launched with the same synchronism.

Le 1^er mai 1931, comme prévu, le président Hoover, depuis Washington, appuyait sur un bouton pour illuminer et inaugurer l’édifice.

Its construction, including the purchase of the land, cost 41 million US dollars.

Barely 20 months had passed since the architects had signed the design contract.It had taken 13 months to build the 102 -story building.

We calculated that in a year and 45 days, the construction had required 7 million hours of work.At the top of the activity, 3,440 men worked simultaneously on the site.

The lesson: this feat had been allowed by a consultation of skills from the design, a very precise schedule and perfect coordination.

"It was really an extraordinary accomplishment, a remarkable example of the power of the coordinated effort," said Geraldine B.Wagner in his work Thirteen Months To Go.

The giant was standing, it remained to occupy it.

Due to the crisis and the abundance of rental spaces, barely a quarter of the offices were rented at the time of the inauguration of the building, which earned it the Sabriquet d'Empty (empty) State Building.

Son ascension par King Kong dans le film de 1933 n’a pas davantage attiré les locataires, mais les visiteurs payants qui se pressaient sur la plateforme d’observation du 86^e étage ont aidé à éponger les déficits.

It will take twenty years before the building reaches profitability.

The Empire State Building will keep the title of the highest skyscraper in the world for more than 40 years, until the appearance of the World Trade Center in the New York panorama in the early 1970s.

Its construction had claimed the lives of six workers and a passerby affected by the fall of a Madrier.

On this plan, the Chrysler Building had beaten the State Empire: no death.