Skyscraper Lust
GELERNTER, DAVID
Architecture Skyscraper Lust By David Gelernter You will be shocked to learn that architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New York Times does not believe New York City ought to pine for...
...The world’s tallest building (1,500-odd ft...
...You might conclude from Goldberger’s article in the August 4 Times that he knows nothing about tall buildings—but in fact he knows plenty, and wrote a fine book on the topic...
...Ask an Establishmentarian to defend one of these axioms and you will draw a blank, because the implicit ground rules stipulate that they don’t have to be defended...
...It underpins the New York Times and (more important) every mainstream TV show and Hollywood film and university and teacher’s college, every textbook and children’s story book...
...IF YOU’RE NOT THRILLED, YOU’RE NOT THRILLED...
...And we are a nation of sourpusses...
...But if you’re not thrilled, you’re not thrilled...
...But Goldberger relies on it in his piece...
...intellectuals have always tended to miss the point of tall buildings...
...I’ll admit there are items I would sooner Manhattan acquire than a new world’s-tallest building...
...No thoughtful liberal would deny that the list exists, and you might even get such a person to sit down with a conservative counterpart and agree on the list’s contents (if not its meaning...
...America no longer wants them, that’s for sure, or at least her spokesmen don’t...
...World’stalleststructure lust is symptomatic, he writes, of “cultures that are in the first flush of excitement at moving onto the world stage...
...Would like to visit a gigantic aviary or ride the world’s biggest Ferris wheel on a rooftop...
...I would like to realize the old modernist fantasy of using (just a bit of) the space between the skyscrapers— to amble around the sky on spiderwebby bridges or ride an 80th-story cable-car...
...The sexes are for all practical purposes interchangeable,” for example...
...I don’t believe we are more mature than skyscraper-age America...
...But when he goes on to assert that “the same could once have been said of the Eiffel Tower” he is wrong again...
...the tower was 501 feet...
...And surely Goldberger doesn’t hold that late 19th-century France was a culture in its “first flush of excitement at moving onto the world stage...
...And no doubt we would never have approved the project in the first place, if only because putting up the Empire State meant tearing down the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel...
...Critics, big shots, sophisticates, and “activists” are repelled by world’s-tallestbuilding talk, and, faced with this unified front, the man in the street goes along, for the record...
...scene, no question...
...not a thing to be done about it...
...Fair enough...
...Notre Dame, Chartres, Amiens were largely finished...
...But it’s lucky the Empire State Building wasn’t constructed the way his argument is, or it would have collapsed into rubble the first time a pigeon sat on it...
...Nevertheless, his piece is representative, because you would be hard-pressed to find a critic anywhere in the country who thinks that the world’s tallest building is a thing worth having...
...At last we reach “that greatest of all symbols, the Empire State Building”—which turns out to be, as Goldberger sees it, yet another specimen of “international design language” versus buildings that incorporate “anything specific to their place...
...Goldberger, in strictest confidence, critic to critic: The degree to which the New York City public retains that oldtime skyscraper lust is, my guess would be, 100 percent...
...it was put up on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition celebrating the centennial of the Revolution...
...But that is not because we are too mature but because we are too passive and tired...
...The evidence on the whole decisively contradicts it...
...When work on Beauvais began, French Gothic culture was risen rather than rising...
...The urbanologist Lewis Mumford thought the Empire State’s 200-foot mooring mast was ridiculous, “a public comfort station for migratory birds...
...To write these axioms down and publish them in TV Guide and a million other places would be a great thing...
...People saw the Empire State as pure essence of Manhattan from the start...
...Humans have an absolute duty to preserve every species in its natural habitat...
...Eiffel’s tower was certainly intended to feel French...
...of a “rising culture” that has reached a particular moment that “comes after beginnings and before maturity...
...One culture is as good as another...
...Actually, 157 feet was the height of the nave, not the tower over the crossing...
...Tall buildings do not reflect brazen, adolescent cultures-on-themake...
...I have news for him: We are post-mature also...
...Yet as Goldberger himself wrote of this building in his book The Skyscraper, “it was startling, but somehow not all that surprising...
...Nowadays the Mumfords beat the Hoods every time...
...That we are culturally more mature and sophisticated than oldtime America (before the late 1960s) is an Establishment Axiom, and an especially important one...
...Architecture Skyscraper Lust By David Gelernter You will be shocked to learn that architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New York Times does not believe New York City ought to pine for its long-lost world’s-tallest-building title...
...Opening day would have seen the public celebration of the decade...
...But in any case Beauvais contradicts Goldberger’s thesis...
...Today’s list derives ultimately from the proposition that race prejudice is wrong, which really is axiomatic and selfevident...
...Because we are a crotchety-old-man society, we find the exuberance of skyscraper builders incomprehensible and damned annoying...
...Today’s Asian skyscrapers, Goldberger writes, “emerge more out of an international design language than out of anything specific to their place...
...They emerge in fact (or did traditionally) out of eminently mature cultures flaunting their wealth, technology, design genius, and sheer radiant self-confidence...
...Gothic art,” writes Louis Grodecki, “had reached and even passed its zenith...
...is today nearing completion in Kuala Lumpur, and other Asian skyscrapers will go even higher soon—which sets Goldberger thinking...
...It will show,” Eiffel said, “that we are not simply an amusing people, but also the country of engineers and builders who are called upon all over the world to construct bridges, viaducts, train stations and the great monuments of modern industry...
...The whole project took twentyone months, from site acquisition to the tenants’ moving in...
...We don’t have it in us to do this sort of thing, but the wheel will turn and, who knows...
...All the sourpuss harrumphing in the world wouldn’t have wiped the smile off the city’s face...
...But if Donald Trump had succeeded in putting the world’s number-one skyscraper back in Manhattan where it belongs (he tried in the late 1980s and was beaten back by community activists), the public would have been thrilled...
...As a warm-up, would like to see some of the city’s flatter, higher roofs better used...
...we do lack the sheer brute energy that went into a building like the Empire State...
...The sourpuss element has always been big on the U.S...
...The next generation might...
...Meanwhile, I’ll tell you something, Mr...
...Goldberger would agree, I assume, that we are a “post-modern” culture...
...Thus Beauvais cathedral, built in the 13th century, was “a brazen attempt by height-obsessed French builders to erect the world’s tallest tower (157 feet...
...they are self-evident...
...It’s true that the Empire State has the quality of quintessentiality, of not having been invented so much as discovered at long last, like a law of physics—the skyscraper...
...would give the public a clear picture, finally, of what the culture war is about...
...The pronouncements of today’s cultural Establishment are based implicitly on a list of axioms...
...Raymond Hood unlike Mumford was a great architect and he set things straight: the mooring mast, he said, was “a thrilling feature...
...And as such it transcends time and place...
...Having a career is morally preferable to being a homemaker...
...Believing in that original axiom made intellectuals feel so warm and good they generated a whole raft more, and here we are...
...INTELLECTUALS HAVE ALWAYS TENDED TO MISS THE POINT OF TALL BUILDINGS...
...Given other New York landmarks and visions of the time—the Chanin Building, Hood’s Daily News Building, Hugh Ferriss’s luminous brooding skyscraper drawings...
...Would like to visit a museum or amphitheater under a glass shed (and see a concert against lit-up spires under a glass roof and gentle snowfall...
...How surprising could it be, given the extent to which it was shaped by New York City’s 1916 stepback zoning law...
...The Axioms List is the most important document of our culture...
...And when the Establishment is unanimous, it’s a sure sign of trouble...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 3
