Sunday Thoughts

the elevator

The automobile is often regarded as the catalyst for our current capitalist society, but what if I said that the elevator, (yes the elevator!) played it’s fair share too.

Many urbanists have pointed to the elevator as having massive significance, arguing this seemingly innocent invention has not only invited us to build taller, and without it, cities and our life in them would simply not be what it is today.

The elevator, as with most new technologies, had a bit of a rocky beginning. They first came on the scene in 1857 after one was installed in a prominent department store in non other than New York City. Just three years later though it was shut down because well, none wanted to ride it. There also wasn’t really a need for it. Most buildings were intentionally built to be closer to the ground, and rents were in fact cheaper the higher the floor since it meant you needed to take the stairs.

So the elevator started out more so as a tourist attraction, a sort of luxurious experience in fancy hotels across New York, Paris, and London. The actual rooms in the elevators were designed to be quite elegant.

The problem was that these elevators were powered by steam engine which meant they were extremely slow and not every efficient. So if they were to take the jump from “fun” and “gimmicky” to having a more profound impact on how we moved through buildings something needed to change - and indeed, things did change. In 1870 when the first office building in Manhattan implemented a hydraulics power elevator to cater to it’s 130 stories. Fast forward to the 1920’s, architects were catching on and with the push from hydraulics to electricity, buildings could feature higher stories, meaning living and working on higher floors become more desirable. This in turn meant more people could work, since more offices could open, and there were more places for people to live if we just kept building higher apartment blocks.Nowadays, elevators are a given in almost any medium sized building, and the very limits to building taller have all but disappeared. There no longer any reservations about accessing entire worlds high up from the ground.

Just as we saw in the progression from steam to hydraulics, and then on to electric power, the elevators of the future will too be part of the ever growing desire to innovate and accommodate the changing realities of urban life. This could mean doing away all together with buttons for example, and instead using ‘smart’ technologies to disipher traffic flows in a building. Or, it could mean reimagining how a elevator runs on a more technical level. In Germany, Multi, is a project doing just that. It sees the future of elevator design as being cable-less, with the ability to run both vertically and horizontally.

As our world becomes increasingly more populated, cities are attempting to catch up. Housing and other amenities needed to accommodate a growing urban population will make building up necessary, and the elevator will surely continue to be a part of this.

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