Architecture is Awesome #16: Skyscrapers

Empire State Building (all photos by me)

This is another in my series of posts inspired by 1000 Awesome Things, the Webby Award winning blog written by Neil Pasricha. The series is my meditation on the awesome reasons why I was and continue to be attracted to the art of architecture. 

Our desire to build tall, whether in the service of God or mammon, appears to be innate. We’ve built soaring church spires, minarets, and pagodas to reach for the heavens. We design skyscrapers that tower even and ever higher, profit-driven embodiments of economic ambition and optimism. Skyscrapers in their truest sense seemingly defy gravity, determinedly rising floor over floor as if yearning for a spiritual connection with the firmament above. We crane our necks as they draw our eyes skyward towards pinnacles that merge hazily with the clouds overhead. Our greatest skyscrapers and skyscraper cities inspire jaw-dropping wonder, astonishment, and admiration. 

Skyscrapers are immodest symbols of our technological advancement and prowess, their impressive height serving as potent avatars for human striving and risk-taking. The ability to build ever taller was the product of a series of engineering breakthroughs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which included the advent of load-bearing structural frames, safe and convenient elevators, and lightweight building enclosures. Chicago architects and engineers may have pioneered many of these advancements, but it was their New York counterparts who perfected the art of skyscraper design. In particular, New York’s Jazz-era, Art Deco masterpieces—among them the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center—provided definitive forms that were modern and unprecedented, befitting the new vertical order of the emerging metropolis. 

Midtown Manhattan

We find New York’s Art Deco towers appealing because we can imagine ourselves occupying their upper reaches. We also easily ascribe personalities to these buildings. We instinctively anthropomorphize them, picturing them in conversation or otherwise interacting with one another, as Madelon Vriesendorp cheekily suggested in her painting Flagrant Delit. These towers arose within a relatively short period of time during the 1920s and 30s and are increasingly overshadowed by newer, less elegant skyscrapers, yet they remain central figures defining what makes New York the city the world knows. We romanticize these buildings because they so readily induce such sentimentalizing. 

Louis Sullivan famously said of skyscrapers: 

“The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.” 

The best skyscrapers soar heavenward but also firmly root themselves within their urban contexts. They bring vitality and a bustling energy to the surrounding streets. The best skyscrapers engage the public realm, rather than standing aloof from it. They exhibit visual interest across a variety of scales, from small to large, ensuring geometrical coherence and ordering at the urban level. Referring again to New York’s classic skyscrapers as examples, their architecture communicates with us and helps connect them with neighboring buildings and districts. Outstanding skyscrapers are essential to the identity of and appreciation for our major cities as complex, interacting wholes. 

Chrysler Building

Of course, skyscrapers are also monuments to hubris, ego, and plutocratic capitalism. So many of today’s crop are merely big rather than truly tall, scaleless rather than attuned to the anthropometrics of human beings. These behemoths are too often overweening phalluses, overly proud, engaging their skylines with a pronounced lack of grace. They frequently do little to engage or return life to the streets below them. Many of the most prominent and celebrated recent examples are byproducts of overly simplistic and arbitrary computer algorithms that yield “contemporary” designs devoid of actual sophistication or nuance. 

Perhaps the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel will repeat itself, though rather than halt the building of a single massive tower, God will see fit to end the proliferation of skyscrapers that thoughtlessly speak the same undifferentiated language without regard for the specifics of their place. Instead, new towers would arise in their place exquisitely tailored to the cities of which they would be inextricable parts. Given their impressive size and prominence, the design quality of our tallest buildings truly matters.

1 World Trade Center

Skyscrapers are undeniably breathtaking engineering marvels. They cannot help but vie for our attention. They continue to push the limits of our technology and imagination. For better or worse, skyscrapers stand tall as powerful symbols. There’s no doubt they are among the most AWESOME examples of architecture humans have ever produced. 

Next Architecture is Awesome: #17 The Golden Ratio