Chris Hytha’s favorite skyscraper is the Carbon & Carbide Building. The photographer lives in Philadelphia but keeps a picture of the Chicago landmark on his bedroom wall. “It’s just mesmerizing,” he says. The 503-foot-high art deco structure is famously topped by a gold-covered cap, but the opulent ornamentation is impossible to fully appreciate from the ground. That was the inspiration behind Hytha’s Highrises series, which shows the tops of skyscrapers from across the country, including many of Chicago’s most renowned, from a rare perspective: straight on. “So many of these details are hundreds of feet up, where you can barely make out the ornate designs,” Hytha says.
While studying architecture at Drexel University, Hytha started shooting row houses in Philadelphia, photographing them in a consistent manner to show their variety. Two years ago, he turned his attention to towers — mostly art deco ones, in which he sees “the wealth and prosperity and excitement and optimism of the 1920s.” Seeking an eye-level perspective, Hytha, who is working with Pittsburgh-based writer Mark Houser on a book based on the project , decided to photograph the buildings using a drone, but there was one problem: Drones capture images in landscape orientation, and he wanted to shoot the towers vertically.
His solution? He would move a drone progressively up the skyscraper and later weave several images together digitally over a composite background. It’s a complicated process, one made even more complex by FAA rules and municipal regulations about drones. (In Chicago, he had to get a permit from the city’s film office.) But the result is a series of images that reveal intimate details of our architectural marvels, showing them as you’ve never seen them before.
