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SKYSCRAPERS

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, the skyscraper was a product of the City Machine (in Walter Benjamin’s concept of the modern city), where the economy replaced a religious myth in determining the city form and it represented what in a cosmic city served as the divine center – the vertical. In early city forms, the vertical, represented a central point – an increased effort and attention to the sky – think of a ziggurat or a church tower. In the city of faith, one’s existence was explained in the shape of the house of faith, a cathedral, serving as the focus of the urban (and cosmic) world and, through the steeple’s touching of the sky, uniting the celestial and the terrestrial.

With the speedy conquest of the American continent by railroad, the rails coming out of Pennsylvania steel mills turned skyward and the skyscraper replaced the church building and city machine the cosmic city diagram. Skyscraper as a monument to individualism, self-interest, and exploitation, seized the mythical image of marriage between the earth and sky. In America, at the start of the 20th century, with the rational blessing of the Puritan philosophy of the chosen and the less fortunate, the skyline became a racetrack of exhibited profi t, just as the continental railroad became a graph of steel production more than half-a-century before.

American skyscrapers and their presence in the fi nancial centers became a barometer of profi t, space, time, and compression – all on a vertical axis of success. In terms of the city machine, the channels of communication between the segregated fragments of the city have turned upward as well. The separate functions of the city machine were hierarchically placed into the successive horizontal layers of the city: subway, car, pedestrian, elevated, airplane (see postcards of airship docking at the Empire State Building’s antenna). The skyscraper may have been be fi lled with images of joyous work, sweat, and hope, as in Carl Sandburg’s poems of Chicago, celebrating the one-man enterprise, eventually dwarfi ng everything around itself. Yet the 20th century high-rise also became a symbol of human alienation and dismemberment (think of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Kafka’s Castle, or Hitchcock’s Rear View Window). With the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers at the end of the 20th century, skyscrapers became also symbols of hubris and vulnerability – cosmic signs of a tragic hero of antiquity.