GOING DOWN

Elevators were once jewels of design, ornately carved and conceived mini-apartments, up to the sky and back again. Why have we abandoned this space?

- MICHAEL WATERS

Lone Star Gas Co. Building, Dallas, 1931

Jonathan Baron, an interior designer who has spent nearly 30 years sprucing up luxury buildings all over New York, knows the elevator usually comes last.

Developers are always eager to talk about the design of the lobby and the hallways—the elevators, not so much. “They could just create a box and get away with it,” Baron says.

Chicago Board of Trade Building, Chicago, 1930

Once, the elevator was considered an essential transitional space that, in addition to whisking you to an upper floor, smoothed out the aesthetic shift from lobby to hallway. The majestic tracery on the elevator doors in the Woolworth Building, for instance, intentionally refracts the marble and bronze across the rest of the building, envisioned by architect Cass Gilbert.

Woolworth Building, New York City, 1913

Elevators are “the most intimate experience one has in a building,” Baron says. Perhaps that is why a century ago they were treated like architectural marvels—note the Art Deco doors of the Chrysler Building elevators or the woven metal mesh elevator cabs in the Seagram Building. Multiple elevator fragments have worked their way into the exhibitions of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

Bacardi Building, Havana, 1930