Skyscraper Seduction, Skyscraper Rape

Skyscraper Seduction Skyscraper Rape Dolores Hayden

Once you learn to look upon architecture not merely as an art, more or less well, more or less badly, done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant, and obscure and unnoted phenomena become illuminated.

—Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 1901

The skyline of Manhattan tells the dynamic story of the growth of American capitalism in the past century; we see a few lively Gothic and Art Deco towers marked with the names of individual tycoons, then many bland International-style office towers built by industrial corporations, real estate developers, and the government; and finally, a limited number of super towers, remote and anonymous, like the multi-national corporations or multi-jurisdictional bureaucracies which inhabit them. A complex national symbol, the American skyscraper has been associated with military force and corporate expansion during various phases of American economic and urban growth. In popular culture, skyscrapers have also symbolized personal social mobility and personal sexuality for those who commission, design, or use these buildings. In the history of world architecture, the skyscraper ranks as America's most distinctive technical innovation; in the history of human settlements, the skyscraper dominated city is America's legacy to the world. For a century most American architectural historians have busily rationalized the aesthetic, functional, and social distress the skyscraper creates, nurturing the prevalent belief that the skyscraper is a glorious triumph of engineering, a natural part of urban life, and an inevitable result of urban concentration.

1. For an aesthetic justification, see Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,"" in Kindergarden Chats and Other Writings (New York: Wittenborn, 1947). For an aesthetic analysis focusing on analogies with classical columns, see Winston Weisman, "A New View of Skyscraper History," in Edgar Kauffman, ed., The Rise of an American Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1970). Diana Agrest, in "Le Ciel est la limite," adds to this with a discussion about towers reaching into outer space, L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui (sky-scraper issue) (March-April 1975), pp. 55-64. Cass Gilbert, in his intro duction to Skyscrapers of New York by Vernon Howe Bailey (New York: Rudge, 1928), goes on about "Mt. Woolworth" and the "Singer-horn," viewing skyscrapers as mountains and cliffs created in the city. Many other architects take up this last image, Hugh Ferriss and Raymond Hood being notable examples. Manfredo Tafuri has criticized it in the L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui issue. A brief article which provides welcome relief from the usual romanticization is by Elizabeth Lindquist Cock and Estelle Jussim, "Machismo in American Architecture," Feminist Art Journal (Spring 1974), pp. 8-10, but the authors conclude, "...at what cost these expressions of machistic corporate power? ... Perhaps it is time to in sist that women be given the chance to design our buildings." This suggestion bypasses the economic demand for skyscrapers rather naively, assuming that female architects employed by large corporations would actually be in a position to create real alternatives. Gertrude Kerbis, Chicago architect, makes a more realistic assessment of the small changes possible when she states that men have designed high-rises as sexual symbols and that if she got a chance to design a skyscraper, it would have some air spaces for wind to pass through. On Kerbis, see Donna Joy Newman, "High-rise-ing Women, Making a Mark on the Skyline," Chicago Tribune (August 8, 1976), Sec. 5, p. 7.

While the skyscraper is a cultural artifact reflecting the economic developments of the past century, it is also a building type designed to affect both economic activity and social relations. As a result, a fuller history of the skyscraper reveals a century of struggles and protests against the tendency to build ever higher. The builders' fantasies alternate with grim reality. Each new argument in favor of the skyscraper may incorporate some response to previous urban protests against it. Yet there is no escape from the contradictions of the capitalist city; as an instrument for enhancing land values and corporate eminence, the sky scraper consumes human lives, lays waste to human settlements, and ultimately overpowers the urban economic activities which provided its original justification.

Perhaps the metaphor of rape suggested by the strongly phallic form of the skyscraper can illuminate the process by which American urban residents and workers have, at times, resigned themselves to this oppressive architectural form. In our literature, as in our judicial system, rape has often been presented as seduction. The aggressor "couldn't help himself," we are told, or the victim "really wanted it." The skyscraper is justified by builders with the same rhetoric: developers "can't help themselves," or the city "really wants it," despite the economic and social anguish it brings. A brief review of skyscraper history illuminates a painful dialectical process with alternating themes of reality and fantasy, rape and seduction.

First Fantasy: "Manifest Destiny"

The earliest tall structures in the United States, monumental military obelisks and columns like the Bunker Hill Battle Monument (completed in 1843), provided symbolic as well as technological precedents for skyscraper construction. These monuments usually included observatories which became popular spots for surveying the surrounding urban and rural landscape. Such grand vistas were associated with the cry for westward expansion or "manifest destiny" accepted by many patriotic Americans as a political goal during the mid-nineteenth century. John Zukowsky has described the experience of the ascending observers, ...afforded seemingly endless panoramic views, and visual participation in those expansionist concepts without facing the dangers, hardships, and expense of physical relocation west." He adds that "the military connotations inherent in those monuments reminded all that this westward expansion would be protected, and policies of Manifest Destiny upheld through force if necessary."

2. John Zukowsky, "Monumental American Obelisks—Centennial Vistas," unpublished paper (1975).

The symbolic imagery of military monuments was first transformed into a vision of the American city by Erastus Salisbury Field, an itinerant painter from westem Massachusetts. His Historical Monument of the American Republic combined in one large canvas ten columns which implied "visual participation in expansionist concepts, as well as militarism appropriate to the 1876 centennial celebration of American independence. He composed these columns, usually seen as isolated monuments, into a spectacular urban design with an elevated railway linking the observatories at their tops. During the following decade, the American city began to evolve dramatically in the direction Field had whimsically imagined.

In the 1850s, 1860s and early 1870s, the elevator and the cast iron frame boosted the size of commercial buildings, which still tried to conceal their height under gawky mansard roof lines; in the 1880s and 1890s, such traditional roof lines were abandoned in favor of competition for height, and steel-framed towers began to fill the business districts of New York and Chicago. Some of these tall buildings included observatories similar to those atop the traditional monuments, so visitors to skyscrapers could also have panoramic views. Private offices, conference rooms, and clubs were also located at the tops of the towers, from which executives could overlook the cities their enterprises dominated. Just as the centennial obelisks and columns had been decorated with statues of heroes, so the new skyscrapers often bore the names of tycoons, and, sometimes, their statues looming against the sky, proclaiming not the patriotic warriors' slogan, "manifest destiny," but the corporate imperative, "survival of the fittest."

Reality: Workers' Funerals

The social Darwinist motto, "survival of the fittest," was an accurate description of the skyscraper construction process. At the turn of the century, competition for height and eagerness to realize a return on investments led builders to encourage architects and engineers to strain the limits of existing technology with each new tower. "Survival of the fittest" in the builders' world of financial speculation thus became the excuse for casual attitudes toward safety conditions for construction workers. One British reporter lugubriously observed public reactions to the deaths of workers on the Woolworth Building, constructed between 1911 and 1913: "Anybody in America will tell you without tremor (but with pride) that each story of a skyscraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories—twenty men snuffed out; thirty stories thirty men. A building of some sixty stories is now going up sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic hearths to be slowly rearranged." 3. Arnold Bennett, "Your United States," quoted in Harlan Paul Douglas, The Suburban Trend (New York: Century Co., 1925), p. 305. By 1930, Fortune magazine claimed that this estimate was no longer correct, commenting, "In general, deaths run from three to eight on sizable buildings," but conceded that "a bloodless building is still a marvel."

4. "Skyscrapers: Builders and Their Tools," in The Skyscraper, reprinted from Fortune magazine (New York: American Institute of Steel Construction, 1930), p. 29.

Ironworkers (who erect structural steel) endure the greatest risks. Often builders and journalists use the language of militaristic, romanticized machismo to describe the "raw danger" of a "daredevil" ironworker's job, and the Stars and Stripes is always unfurled whenever a building is topped out suggesting a patriotic conquest. Yet ironworkers themselves may feel fearful, since Mike Cherry reports in his autobiography, On High Steel, that one out of fifteen dies within ten years of entering this risky trade. 5. Mike Cherry, On High Steel: The Education of an Ironworker (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), p. 27. Cherry recounts his gut reaction to a look at the New York skyline: "the anxiety that I'd thought I'd conquered came running back at me all over again. ..The city had never struck me as so tall before.. .I drove past several buildings that were nearing completion, twice pulling over to the curb to stare at them, developing a slight case of the shakes."

6. Ibid., p. 169.

Theodore James, author of a recent history of the Empire State Building, constructed between 1929 and 1931, recalls the days when ironworkers were called by the condescending, romantic nickname, "sky-boys," (perhaps relating them to military air heroes called fly-boys), yet he passes lightly over the fourteen fatalities and numerous injuries that occurred during the building process. 7. Theodore James, Jr., The Empire State Building (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 68. In contrast to many American projects, the Eiffel Tower, a tall and complex engineering project, was built in Paris in 1889 without a single fatality; the effort and resources expended on safety equipment matched the desire for spectacular height. Cherry has a grimmer view of the trade in New York in those years, claiming that foremen could insist on work in hazardous wet weather, or cut off a man's pay at the moment of an accident. He states that during the Depression "gangs of out-of-work ironworkers hung about on the streets around job sites, so that when a man fell, they would be instantly available to take his place." 8. Cherry, pp. 26-27. In the 1930s, the best workers in each building trade, alive and walking at the end of a skyscraper job, were awarded Certificates of Superior Craftsmanship" and gold buttons for their skill by a building contractors' association, but both union and insurance company safety campaigns got nowhere because of the developers' pressure to build quickly.

9. Fortune, p. 29.

Today, construction workers' unions are stronger. No one has to work in the rain, and a fallen worker (or his widow) at least gets paid for a full day's work. Still the grim process of building a skyscraper continues to take its toll of lives, as Cherry described a death on a New York job in 1972: "Somehow, Timmy, in hurrying from one side of the bay to the other, managed to put his inside foot down an inch to the right of where he should have, and the plank, which had a slight warp in it, rocked...He fell in silence, and no sound from the impact of his body on the concrete plaza reached up to us." 10. Cherry, p. 232. Some of the highly skilled, agile iron workers willing to endure the risks of this trade are American Indians, and in their employment the symbolism of manifest destiny turns in an ironic circle. Descendants of the native Americans who survived the white man's self-righteous westward ex pansion in the nineteenth century, they build the secular monuments of a redefined, corporate, manifest destiny.

Second Fantasy: "Procreant Power

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while tycoons battled for top positions on the skyline, and "sky-boys' fell to their deaths, skyscraper architects began to use the imagery of male sexuality to describe these buildings. The earlier monuments had celebrated military conquests, and now towers did the same for economic conquests. Just as American authors like Theodore Dreiser and Henry James used the imagery of male potency to enhance the moneymaking activities of fictional entrepreneurs like Frank Cowperwood or Caspar Goodwood, so many American architects began to express the economic power of their corporate clients through metaphors of sexual power. Thus the imagery of war and patriotic death was overlaid with an imagery of fecundity and generative power. However, as skyscraper architects added the office tower to the procession of phallic monu ments in history—including poles, obelisks, spires, columns, and watchtowers—very few designers asked what the effects would be of insisting that ordinary people regularly inhabit such extraordinary, tall, erect structures.

In 1901 Louis Sullivan praised the design of a commercial building (which was not a skyscraper) by H. H. Richardson: "...here is a man for you to look at. ..a real man, a manly man; a virile force...an entire male. ..a monument to trade, to the organized commercial spirit, to the power and progress of the age...a male...it sings the song of procreant power...." 11. Louis Sullivan, Kindergarden Chats, pp. 29-30. He refers to the Marshall Field Wholesale Warehouse, Chicago. As Sullivan himself and other architects built commercial skyscrapers, this language of male identification was extended. One designer saw skyscrapers as "symbols of the American spirit—that ruthless, tireless, energeticism delightedly proclaiming What a great boy am I!'" 12. Claude Bragdon, "Skyscrapers, in The Architecture Lectures, (Chicago: Creative Age Press, 1942), p. 103. In 1936 Le Corbusier identified himself with America's vital economic forces, using phrases which recalled Sullivan's "song of procreant power." He observed "an erect Manhattan, the drives of Chicago, and so many clear signs of youthful power." Viewing the skyline of New York, he wrote, "Feeling comes into play; the action of the heart is released; crescendo, allegro, fortissimo. We are charged with feeling, we are intoxicated, legs strengthened, chest expanded, eager for action, we are filled with a great confidence. 13. Le Corbusier, "I Am an American," in When All the Cathedrals Were White (1936) (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), pp. 90, 149 The architectural historian Vincent Scully carried this celebration of skyscrapers, money and sex into the 1960s when he praised Rockefeller Center as ...one of the few surviving public spaces in America that look as if they were designed and used by people who knew what stable wealth was and were not ashamed to enjoy it. Flags snap, high heels tap: a little sex and aggression, the city's delights."

14. Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 154.

The erotic charge of the skyscraper was more explicitly related to phallic erection and penetration in formal discussions of towers as including base, shaft, and tip, and in graphic visions of the skyscraper. A rendering of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Fraternity Temple scheme of 1891 shows a phallic tower on a broad base with a pointed tip piercing the sky. Many architectural renderers of the 1920s, such as Hugh Ferriss, often utilized perspective to convey a sense of upward thrust, enhanced by strong lighting from below. Lighting could suggest ejaculation as well as erection, as in a view of the Chrysler Building ejaculating light into the night. (Its articulated tip anticipates today's skyscrapers with brightly lit revolving restaurants, where diners can rotate tirelessly in the night skies above American cities.)

Architects' words and graphics encouraged their clients to phallic, urban displays, but occasionally architects might do more. A 1931 photograph shows seven men positioned in an irregular line, wearing cloth costumes banded with vertical or horizontal stripes. Tall cones or ziggurats cover their heads. Six levels of sharp-edged points culminate in an eighteen-inch rod atop the leader's mask, making his total stature nine feet. Are these tribesmen about to execute some primitive ritual celebrating male fertility? Below the photograph the caption reads: "Famous architects forming a miniature skyline of New York as they don their Beaux Arts costumes." The symbolic predilections of skyscraper architects have rarely been shown so clearly: urban professional men require a social occasion to turn themselves into a Dionysian landscape, a miniature version of the revenue-generating skyline they promote in their daily work.

Reality: Urban Bankruptcy

Whatever the myths about their phallic power, towers have proved economically powerful, but in a negative as well as a positive way. The glorification of the "procreant power" of the skyscraper serves to obscure the drain on municipal finances which towers create. Many urban historians have described the American urban downtown as a three-dimensional graph of land speculation, and locating clusters of towers is a quick way to guess at land values. Yet although tall buildings reflect the desire for maximizing private investment in a city based upon private land ownership, skyscrapers are not always profitable for their developers. For whom is skyscraper revenue generated? And how is it calculated?

A need for immediate usable space is never enough reason for building a skyscraper. The construction cost of several low-rise buildings is almost always less than the cost of equivalent space in a skyscraper since expensive foundations and unusable space for elevators and mechanical equipment increase as the tower goes higher. Land cost, rather than building cost, is the justification: a very expensive piece of downtown land may be said to "require" a skyscraper to explain its price. 15. One example of the older literature describing economic "rationality" is William C. Clark and J. L. Kingston, The Skyscraper, A Study in the Economic Height of Modern Office Buildings (New York: American Institute of Steel Construction, 1930). Clark and Kingston rationalize a profitable 75 stories. During this period 75 stories was often exceeded and the Empire State Building was under construction including 102 stories. But the height of such a skyscraper will not be calculated on the city's needs, nor even on the current value of the land and the existing density of the area. Rather, a developer calculates the rising land values created by present and future skyscrapers, and makes a guess about how much more land speculation the neighborhood will bear. Developers who try to profit from the inflation of urban land values in this way almost always leverage their capital with large bank loans. Banks of course receive large amounts of interest. Developers therefore attempt to minimize their indebtedness by hastening the construction process (with the hazardous consequences for workers previously described) and by taking advantage of the federal tax structure and selling tax "shelters" (derived from real estate tax loopholes) to profit-making industrial corporations.

While banks and large tax-sheltered, industrial corporations can always profit from the "procreant power" of the skyscraper, real estate developers hope for rising land values to justify their investments. Meanwhile, taxpayers bear the huge public costs of infrastructure and services for skyscraper developments. As Stephen Zoll argues in "Superville," "an increasing CBD (central business district) bulk becomes, itself, the principal sink in the municipal treasury." 16. Stephen Zoll, "Superville: New York, Aspects of Very High Bulk, Massachusetts Review (Summer 1973), p. 538. Zoll provides an eloquent discussion of political and economic factors in skyscraper construction with an extended bibliography. A former New York City employee, he sees the need for cities to reform their accounting systems and show the social costs of CBD density. His persuasive historical analysis of high rise economics in New York explains why skyscraper construction is disastrous for the city's budget: municipal tax revenues never catch up with the spiraling costs of infrastructure which the city must provide. Attempts to control urban density through zoning or to raise taxes are usually met with corporate threats to leave the city altogether, which would cause unemployment. Caught between financial drain and the skyscraper and the threat of unemployment, the city loses either way.

The tactics of land speculation and of transferring infrastructure costs to the city budget explain some of the reasoning behind the craze for skyscraper height, but there is still more to explore. Since the turn of the century many developers, aware of the economically and technologically "optimal" level of speculation on a given parcel of urban land, have chosen to build ever higher, and urban officials have accepted this. The builders have sacrificed high economic returns in order to enter a citywide, nationwide, or worldwide competition for height and prestige. 17. Many cities are engaged in such symbolic battles. Perhaps the most extreme ironies are the deliberately misleading understatements issued by builders during construction, in order to fool competitors into thinking that the new structure is less tall than it really will be. Suzanne Zwarun, in "The Calgary Tower," Interlude (Oct.-Nov. 1976), p. 9, writes about Calgary's Husky Tower. The developers lied, she explains, boasting of 613 feet when all the time the structure was 626 feet. "The developers kept thirteen extra feet in reserve to protect the image of the Canadian west.....They knew some dirty rat would toss a few more feet on a project somewhere, just so it would out-tower the Husky Tower... Take that, San Antonio. In terms of monopoly capitalism, although the tallest building in town may not be quantitatively efficient as office space or housing it is qualitatively efficient in promoting dominance over an urban region: towers are landmarks which can be seen from many distant viewpoints. They become symbols of corporate dominance over the city as well as the city's dominance over the region.

The goal in building these extremely tall skyscrapers is psychological "procreant power" or awe. Awareness of the power this kind of architecture offers is reflected by the skyline of Washington, D.C., where skyscrapers over 90 feet tall are forbidden by law, so that the Capitol reigns as the highest structure. For many years, beginning in 1931, the Empire State Building was the tallest in the world; its pretentious name and an overbearing lobby mural showing the building dominating a map of New York, "the Empire State," enhanced its awesomeness. The World Trade Center rose higher in 1969. Its even more imperial name reflected an obvious attempt to supercede the Empire State Building. Yet in both cases symbolic posturing concealed unrented space, as these hulking developments were planned to exceed all calculations of needed office space in the city. Knowing that the World Trade Center was not fully rented, the owners of the Empire State threatened to build just enough extra structure to overtop them in the 1970s, and triumph again. They didn't pursue this competition however, and as a result the 1976 version of the film King Kong transferred the symbolic confrontation of the "natural" ape and the "civilized" capitalists from the Empire State, where it was set in 1933, to the World Trade Center, now the tallest structure in New York.

Third Fantasy: "Tm Taking the Town!"

While municipal governments struggle with the high costs of the skyscraper, and builders seek both financial and psychological "procreant power," popular novels and films employ skyscraper imagery to create fantasies about sexual power and upward mobility for "ordinary" people in capitalist society. In the 1970s, women may be cast as executives or stockbrokers in these fables of success. A fashion advertisement compresses many strains of oppressive imagery—militarism, sexual power, false social mobility. Two models wearing suits with military tailoring pose holding statuettes of the Empire State Building. "Thinking positive... The way to make things happen in the city where everything's possible," reads the copy. "In soft, smokey officer's pink, I'm in my element, making strides and taking them.... My head's in the clouds and the view's terrific. Officer's pink in sleek new shapes, that are budding with potential. I'm perfectly suited to the pace of The City...." The dialogue concludes, "I'm taking the town...."

In the movies of the 1920s and 1930s, it was more common to see women encountering skyscrapers as stage-struck young things coming to the big city to seek stardom. Sustaining individual competitiveness in times of collective difficulty, the most successful films of the Depression years, as Martin Pawley has observed, "dealt with the random access to power and influence in high society of 'ordinary' people." 18. Martin Pawley, The Private Future (London: Pan Books, 1974), p. 30. Often such hopeful movie romances occurred in skyscraper offices, skyscraper penthouses, and skyscraper night clubs.

In a production number from the 1933 film musical 42nd Street, miniature skyscraper tips, glowing with colored lights, saluted Ruby Keeler as a sweet kid who managed to become a star, and the manipulation of skyscraper scale made her seem larger than life. A film critic recently commented on the effects of this process: "...life in New York is made more than bearable by the fine romance this city has always had with the movies. We have been exalted by a Hollywood version of ourselves that is often no closer to reality than this scene. This is Big Flick City— and welcome to it." 19. "New York's Love Affair with the Movies," New York (Dec. 29, 1975), p. 33. Another Ruby Keeler film, Go Into Your Dance (1936), elaborates the cinematic process by which New York's hostile environment is "made more than bearable" by the association of the skyscraper with themes of personal success and imperialist corporate expansion. In a night club at the top of a New York tower, Al Jolson in blackface sings, "She's a Latin from Manhattan," about the fantasy of one "ordinary" person making it in the big city. Then Ruby Keeler and other performers in evening dress engage in a dance routine of world domination, climbing up and down a globe, tap dancing on various countries of the Northern Hemisphere to the tune of the title song with its catchy Depression lyrics, "When you feel sad and blue now, go into your dance!"

While these examples show women succeeding, most American skyscraper fantasies have dealt with male success and mo bility, suggesting that an industrious young fellow may develop a personal empire of banks, shipping lines and factories, and build a skyscraper from which to look down on them. Architect Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, and of the 1949 film based on it, endows this plot with an artistic rather than an entrepreneurial tone. Roark, played by Gary Cooper, stands for the survival of the fittest. A poor boy who made good, he fights the "creeping socialism" of his time by designing buildings for tycoons so he can develop his creative genius. At the film's end, Roark stands, remote and supreme, atop a new skyscraper he designed. He is joined there by Dominique Francon, an architectural critic who has been moved to ecstasy by an elevator ride up the side of this building. Roark "takes" both the town and the world of cultured society Francon represents; in fact, early in the story he rapes her and she is rapturous.

Skyscraper restaurants and hotels trade on the renewal of this sort of cinematic fantasy. For the price of a drink or a meal, you can share the reflected power of a skyscraper location. One nationwide chain of penthouse restaurants advertises, "Make a top decision," 20. Make a Top Decision," Stouffer advertisement, Mainliner (United Airlines' Magazine, Nov. 1976), p. 100. implying executive success for those who dine at at the top of a tower. Woody Guthrie made fun of such aspirations when he sang about the Rockefeller Center bar and grill, This Rainbow Room is up so high/ That John D.'s spirit comes a-driftin' by.. " 21. Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 292. but this did nothing to affect its popularity. Although the tip of a skyscraper is an especially charged location, the rest of the skyscraper also has powerful symbolic associations: one foreign resort hotel advertises its advantages to New Yorkers with a photograph of a phallic building superimposed on the bikini-bared torsos of three models. 22. Smack-Dab in the Middle," advertisement for Rio Orthon Palace, New York (Dec. 13, 1976), p. 139. Whether they want to be chief executives or simply sophisticated playboys, clients of skyscraper restaurants or hotels are encouraged in their fantasies of power and control.

Reality: Urban Oppression

In the romantic world of popular films and advertisements, life in the skyscrapers is a whirl of money, power and sex. But as more and more people of all economic classes live and work in skyscrapers, the oppressiveness of these environments cannot be denied. In the 1960s and 1970s, community groups and workers' organizations began to detail the social and physical problems of skyscraper life. Injuries to workers building skyscrapers continued, accompanied by the problems created by the completed skyscrapers themselves.

Ever more gigantic skyscrapers, when placed in urban plazas, could create dangerous wind forces (up to 175 m.p.h.) that hurled pedestrians off their feet. The towers themselves had to be designed to resist wind forces, but unforeseen difficulties could occur, as in the John Hancock Tower in Boston, where winds wrenched gigantic sections of mirror glass from the curtain wall, hurling them to the sidewalks below, terrorizing citizens with resounding smashes. Amazingly, there were no pedestrian fatalities.

Urban residents also complained of enormous skyscraper shadows darkening whole neighborhoods and changing the ecology of local parks. Motorists and pedestrians found shadows were only half the problem with mirror glass buildings which, on their sunny sides, reflected blinding flashes of light into cars and homes. Community groups in San Francisco documented such difficulties when they fought construction of the Transamerica Building and other high-rises. 23. Greggar Sletteland and Bruce Brugmann, eds., The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco's Rush toward the Sky (San Francisco: San Fran cisco Bay Guardian, 1971). In Boston, community groups have slowed but not halted construction of the Park Plaza project, whose shadows will darken the Public Garden.

Workers inside the towers have added their complaints to those articulated by urban residents. Endlessly repeated sky-scraper floor plans reflect hierarchical design which allots interior fluorescent-lit spaces to predominantly female clerical workers, and exterior offices with natural light and views to predominantly male executives. New trends in office landscaping" using low partitions and plants may mute the most obvious effects of such plans, but light and space are always assigned according to status. In the John Hancock Tower, formal rules allow a senior vice president 406 square feet of space compared to a clerical worker's 55. 24. Susan Quinn, "My Desk Is Bigger Than Your Desk: Playing the New Office Status Game," Boston (March 1977), p. 78. If clerical workers constitute the majority of the towers' populations during the day, cleaners work predominantly at night—squads of men and women, poor white, black and foreign born workers. The best paid have extremely perilous daytime jobs washing windows or polishing facades, hanging on scaffolds as high above the streets as the ironworkers. The night shift works for lower wages, and the thrill of seeing the city lit up at night is, after all, the frisson of watching thousands of these cleaners at work.

One of the most serious hazards to all workers in high-rise buildings, by day or by night, is fire. The skyscraper is constructed to resist fire, but if faulty wiring or a smoldering cigarette causes a blaze, then escape from a burning tower can be extremely difficult. Stairwells may fill with smoke, elevator shafts can act like chimneys, and traditional firefighting ladders cannot reach the upper floors. The Towering Inferno, a film about skyscraper conflagration, was playing in New York on the evening of Valentine's Day, 1975, when a moderately serious fire broke out in one of the two World Trade Center buildings there. Because the fire took place at night, most of the thirty injured were fire fighters and cleaners. Building officials managed to calm the thousands of daytime workers, who were unnerved to learn that New York fire codes had not been followed in the construction of the complex. But as skyscraper fires occur every few months around the country, one expects protests to increase. 25. Trade Center Fire Stirs Row," New York Daily News (February 15, 1975), p. 1.

Since the skyscraper has been established in popular culture as a place for "taking the town," personnel in skyscraper offices are exposed increasingly to scenes of conflict at skyscraper tips, which are harrowing to the police, firemen, or passing workers who are involved. Bomb threats are not infrequent in corporate towers, and sometimes there are explosions and kidnappings as well. A Los Angeles Times story for December 7, 1976, headlined "Gunman Holds Hostage Atop Skyscraper: Youth Gives Up After Antismoking Message Is Read On Radio," tells the sad story of a youth trying to attract attention in his crusade against lung cancer by "taking the town" with a weapon and a hostage.

Fourth Fantasy: "Within the City, Without the City's Problems"

In the movies the skyscraper was first presented as a place for dramatic encounters, celebrations, and awe, but as it became the standard building in the center city, the alienation of workers and residents increased. Pre-war fantasies of beautiful, shining tower cities—such as Hugh Ferriss' romantic renderings and Le Corbusier's plans for a Radiant City—led to extensive urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s, when office towers and upper-class housing were joined by the grim, stripped-down tower in a field of asphalt as the preferred solution for public housing, a vertical filing cabinet for the urban poor. While such programs added towers to the already densely built-up cities of New York and Chicago, other American cities like Boston and San Francisco were "Manhattanized," developing predominantly skyscraper skylines for the first time. During these years the expanded activities of many American corporations and American architects abroad led to the exportation of the skyscraper, promoting corporate visibility and land speculation from Paris to Nairobi.

The builders of this era succeeded in realizing the goal of an earlier generation of architects—a city composed largely of towers. As a result, they multiplied the economic problems of the metropolis and the social problems of skyscraper workers and urban residents, but the next generation of fantasizers never let up. Although the city was being turned into a field of towers, the supertower could still stand above it. Frank Lloyd Wright produced a plan for a mile-high skyscraper in 1956. Urban mega- structures proliferated on drafting boards in the 1960s, and in the 1970s, Paolo Soleri continues to lead the utopian skyscraper architects with endless plans for "Arcologies" with towers hung upon towers. (He uses the Empire State Building as a scale symbol to dramatize the size of structures many times its height.) The World Trade Center in New York, the Transamerica Building in San Francisco, and the Sears Tower in Chicago have all set new records for skyscraper height in these cities, but the quest for architectural dominance does not rest with the supertower which is the tallest building in town.

The 1970s have brought a new kind of skyscraper which simply swallows up the city. Instead of a tower being presented as the typical building in the center city, it becomes a substitute for the city. More and more resources and activities are concentrated inside, while problems—wind, shadows, glare, utilities, transportation—are left outside for the municipality to deal with as best it can. In New York, Rockefeller Center anticipated this trend with offices, shops, restaurants, pedestrian spaces, and a skating rink. The World Trade Center is a city of 50,000 within a city of 8,000,000. With its own police force, newspaper, and restaurants, the complex is in many ways a private urban realm of government agencies and corporations set down in the public city of New York. This is a workaday complex, even more deserted at night than Rockefeller Center. Chicago's John Hancock tower, in contrast, functions as a 24-hour skyscraper city, providing housing as well as stores, restaurants and offices. Some residents may rarely emerge; others call the doorman to check the weather (which they live above) before they venture down from the clouds into the real Chicago below.

The ultimate skyscraper development goes even further than these giant towers, incorporating urban landscape as well as residential, commercial, and recreational facilities into its interior design. John Portman's hotels in Atlanta, Cambridge, and San Francisco are hollow towers or pyramids advertised as being as exciting as (and implicitly safer than) the city outside. Interior courtyards and glass elevators allow for the traditional skyscraper observation to occur within rather than outside of the tower. The visitor experiences the thrill of riding to the top of the tower, but the views are carefully controlled vistas of the circumscribed, artificial, urban life within the hotel. Going them one better, two new Atlanta complexes include a lake and an ice skating rink as private skyscraper landscapes on their ground floors. Other build ings reveal the same privatization of landscape. The Ford Foundation Building in New York surrounds an interior garden. The penthouse farm of Stewart Mott, with its "natural" earth loaded onto a New York tower, shows that"nature" can be put on top of a skyscraper rather than left in a public place.

As the American city is economically drained and environmentally destroyed by the skyscraper, developers of tower apartments, hotels, and office blocks sell back a limited, guarded version of urban life to those who can afford it. (This is, after all, what Disney and the'developers of "adventure parks" have done, selling synthetic American rural and small town landscapes.) The new, private tower cities exclude the poor, minorities, the aged, and the unemployed. Fortified by private police forces and by the best technology industrial security firms can supply, these private towers recall the militarism associated with the centennial obelisks and military watchtowers. They pose an extreme answer to urban oppression, selling the urban experience without an urban reality. They want customers to "take the town," and since the real town is too far gone, they offer a substitute.

While urban escapism flourishes and builders construct skyscrapers of the present decade, satirists and science fiction writers have provided strong critical images of a world of urban towers being erected amid urban rubble. "Superstudio, a collective of Italian architects, mocks the trend in their "Twelve Cautionary Tales," with a design for a skyscraper factory stretching around the earth, churning out new towers as fast as the old ones cruble. 26. Superstudio, "Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism," Architectural Design (Dec. 1971), pp. 737-742. On the same theme, J.G. Ballard's story, "Build-Up, describes a world where high-rises cover the earth, except for blacked-out spaces where they have collapsed, and subways and high-speed trains are replaced by vertical and horizontal ele vators. 27. J. G. Ballard, "Build-up," in Cronopolis (New York: 1971), pp. 218-240. For every such satirist, there are many more individuals planning new supertowers, perhaps justifying their projects with the rhetoric of a New York housing developer who advertises his expensive high-rise apartment block as being "within the city but without the city's problems." 28. The Century, ""Look Up, New York!" advertisement, New York (Nov. 22, 1976), p. 45. Skidmore Owings and Merrill offers the perfect architectural expression of this slogan in two of their newest commercial blocks on 57th and 42nd Streets in Manhattan. On each building, a concave facade covered in mirror glass manipulates the view so it appears from below that all the rest of the city is toppling, giving a doomsday twist to the perennial competition for skyscraper size as well as reinforcing the idea that the only city worth experiencing is inside, not out side, the skyscraper.

Making Changes—Fantasy and Reality

Criticizing the design of skyscrapers will not make them disappear, whether the criticism comes from a revisionist historian, an outraged citizen, or a pragmatic urban budget analyst. Patterns of corporate growth and patriarchy have determined the history of the skyscraper. The economics of urban land development today make it impossible to effect major changes in present building trends without a political revolution to socialize all urban land. In the meantime, at least some attempts in changing consciousness can begin. To understand the skyscraper and its place in the American city, we need the perceptions of all skyscraper workers and urban residents, women and men, as well as the specialized insights of architects, artists, and social critics.

As a nation, we have exported the skyscraper around the world. Like pre-Copernicans who dismissed anyone who disputed the place of the earth as center of the solar system, today's American design professionals often exclude from serious architectural and urban discourse anyone who refuses to accept the importance of the skyscraper to "rational" urban design. Romantic notions of military preparedness and "manifest destiny, dreams of economic conquest and "survival of the fittest," fantasies of social mobility and sexual power, all have been marshaled in support of the skyscraper during the past century. All still flourish as skyscraper fantasies today. Designed first as urban monuments, then as typical urban buildings, then as synthetic cities, American skyscrapers attest to the power of fantasy to confuse our perceptions of urban reality. If we look up, we can read in the skyscrapers' looming shapes a reminder that our culture depends on false hopes of economic mobility as well as on rigid hierarchy, and that it thrives on social seduction as well as on architectural rape.

I presented a preliminary version of this paper at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles in March 1974 at a conference on Women and Design. I would like to thank Whitney Chadwick, Robert Manoff, David Hodgdon, Peter Marris, Jean Strouse and Susana Torre, who made extensive com ments on early drafts, as well as Sheila de Bretteville, David Gordon, Rosaria Hodgdon, Jane McGroarty, and Gwen Wright, all of whom sup plied encouragement, material or important perspectives. Klaus Roesch did expert photographic research; Ets Otomo and Thea Muscat typed with precision and speed; members of the Heresies staff helped enormously with the final version. Copyright 1977. Please do not quote without written per mission of the author.