Drone shots of vintage skyscrapers reveal ‘what’s hiding way above our heads’ in Philly and beyond

Chris Hytha was a Phoenixville middle-school student on a family visit to Center City when he fell in love with the Philadelphia skyline.

“That experience is really what led me to study architecture, to explore the city, and to try to find a way to get to the tops of those towers. I couldn’t get enough of Philadelphia,” he said.

With the help of digital technologies, social media, crowdfunding, and NFTs, Hytha, 26, is crafting a career that reflects his youthful aspirations, and more. Since 2015, he’s moved to Philly, earned a degree in architecture from Drexel University, worked for an architecture firm in the city, and established himself as an independent photographer, artist, and designer.

His latest project, Highrises, is an online gallery featuring drone images of skyscrapers built in art deco, Gothic, beaux arts, and other distinctive styles during the late-19th and early-20th centuries across the United States.

“An incredible variety of designs and materials were used in building these towers,” said Hytha, who’s a licensed drone operator.

“The care and the craftsmanship that went into them! We’ll never be able to build buildings like them again.”

When not sending his drone aloft to capture the crowns of skyscrapers in places like Cleveland, Hytha bikes all over Philly from his home in the Mantua neighborhood. His Instagram account — with more than 103,000 followers — has long featured what he calls “cinematic and surreal images” of the city he loves.

“I Photoshop clouds above and ethereal, magical light falling upon the streets we walk on every day,” he said. “It kind of looks like a fantasy world.”

“But after I’d been doing these [almost exclusively] for a while, I thought, ‘There’s got to be more I can do.’”

So in 2021, Hytha began photographing individual Philadelphia rowhouses, a project that yielded an online gallery as well as a coffee-table book. He followed it up with Highrises, a project that celebrates the majestic upper floors and intricate crowns of vintage skyscrapers.

With zigzag patterns and sharp angles that evoked industrial production as well as Native American and ancient Egyptian designs, art deco’s bold signatures became synonymous with the Jazz Age of the 1920s, when skyscraper development boomed in downtowns across America.

Center City’s former Market Street National Bank across from City Hall is one prominent example. So is the Drake, the residential tower that has loomed over Spruce Street just west of Broad since 1929.

“I feel like the first person to see the details up close and show other people what’s hiding way above our heads. Seeing these buildings in a new way is just so satisfying,” Hytha said.

For the Highrises project, Hytha and the writer Mark Houser are showcasing skyscrapers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Buffalo, and other big cities. They are off to see buildings in Birmingham, Ala., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Atlanta this month. Their travels will conclude with a visit to Phoenix later this year. The collaborators will have photographed and documented the exteriors and interiors of 180 buildings in 40 cities.

Hytha deploys his drone to gather as few as five and as many 20 photos at varying elevations of the upper stories and crowns. He uses a Photoshopping technique called stitching to create dramatic, high-resolution scans of individual buildings and sells them on his website.

As he did with Rowhomes, Hytha will self-publish a selection of the skyscraper images in a coffee-table book.

“There’s something about seeing work in a large format, physical form, instead of on a phone,” he said. “After spending hours to polish an image and make it perfect, not having it in print seems ... sacrilegious.”

The project includes examples of not only well-known skyscrapers in art deco and other styles, but lesser-known buildings in smaller cities. Among them are North Philly’s art deco Beury Building (a.k.a. the “Boner 4ever” building), set for redevelopment after standing empty for decades, and Camden’s City Hall.

“Chris’ way of presenting these buildings could almost be described as augmented reality,” said Houser, a Pittsburgh researcher, public speaker, and author of Multi-Stories, a 2020 book about 55 early skyscrapers and their builders.

“His artistic style captures an energy about that era of the 1920s, when people were thrilled to see each new skyscraper,” Houser said. “A century later, people still love these buildings.”

Hytha grew up in Phoenixville, a formerly industrial Chester County community that has enjoyed an economic renaissance in recent years. His parents, Greg and Linda, are musicians and have renovated several dozen Victorian homes since moving to the borough in 1984.

“They renovated the 19th-century house I grew up in and went on from there,” said Hytha. “That early exposure to historic architecture had a big impact on me. I wondered how many other families lived here? What were their lives like?

“In a brand-new building, there are no stories.”

His mother said her youngest son learned to play music with his parents and three older siblings, and also loved to make buildings out of plastic blocks. Later, he spent hours creating structures with the world-building video game Minecraft.

“In a brand-new building, there are no stories.”

“When we went into the city, it was such a wonderful experience for him,” she said. “Walking around the streets, he kept saying, ‘‘Mom, look up there.‘ All his senses came alive.”

She said that Chris’ work “enables us to see things we would otherwise miss. We get to see through his eyes.”

Jon Coddington, a retired professor of architecture who taught Hytha at Drexel, echoed that.

“The tops of tall buildings are rarely seen,” he said. “At street level, you’re only really aware of a building’s first three or four stories. And at a distance, you lose the detail.

“But Chris doesn’t just keep [the details] to himself. He’s saying, ‘This is cool, and I want to share it with others.’ That’s his gift.”

Coddington also advised Hytha regarding his thesis project, titled “Center Square Station,” which reimagined Suburban Station and other Center City transit facilities. Hytha’s thesis took the top prize in the university’s annual Michael Pearson Architecture Prize competition, which looks for a winner who has “exceptional spirit in pursuing the work.”

“The transit network is buried underground, and I opened it up,” Hytha said. “A new station with a grand view of City Hall would let riders know they have arrived in Philadelphia.”

Hytha enjoyed the work, as well as the steady paycheck, while he was employed full-time as a design professional at EwingCole architecture firm, but said he’s “realized the value of ownership and the value of developing my own intellectual property” through working independently.

“There are a lot of uncertainties. It’s all kind of a risk,” he said.

Asked whether taking the risk is worth it, Hytha answered: “One hundred percent.”