Originally instituted simply as restrictive legislation with no aesthetic aims, in the 1920s zoning became the principal inspiration behind a new style in skyscraper design and a new vision of the modern metropolis. After reviewing the specific influence and importance of the New York City zoning law of 1916, the country's landmark legislation, the article examines the commentary on zoning in the architectural press, focusing in particular on the predictions of the law's impact on the morphology of the future city. Previous scholarship has treated the history of zoning in a negative light and has ignored its relationship to visionary ideas. Yet in the many prophecies of a rationalized skyscraper city that were advanced in the 1920s, we can preview the birth of what many architects and critics of the period excitedly pronounced a new era in American architecture and urbanism.
The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) is the leading architectural history journal that is published in the English language. The scholarly articles in JSAH are international in scope and focus on every period in the history of the built environment. The journal is broad in its perspective and features the latest research methodologies in the expanding field of architectural history and allied disciplines including the history of design, landscape, urbanism and historic preservation. Published continuously since 1941, JSAH also features guest editorials, exhibition reviews, book reviews, obituaries of key figures in the discipline and abstracts of papers delivered at the Society's scholarly annual conference. JSAH is a benefit of membership in the Society of Architectural Historians.
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© 1986 Society of Architectural Historians