Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, North Building

Abstract

DESIGNED TO be the tallest building in the world, the uncompleted Metropolitan Life North Building stands like a tombstone for the skyscraper boom of the 1920s. Other than the privately financed Rockefeller Center, no new tall buildings went up until after the war. The nature of those buildings, too, would change, because American businessmen were no longer interested in romantic monuments to themselves, but instead were eyeing the bottom line.