Tall Buildings: An Examination of Ever-Taller Skyscrapers as Cultural Artifacts

In the prologue of your new book, Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper, you write that the book is about "examining tall buildings as cultural artifacts." Please elaborate.

Those of us who have worked as architects on tall buildings are involved in the everydayness of making them-the technical systems, energy management, materials and so on. In this book, I was interested in talking about the "here and now" of skyscrapers. Particularly pertinent to the here and now is the fact that today these buildings are more in the public consciousness than they have ever been and so they have become like many other things in our lives. Certain buildings are objects of desire. Certain buildings are well-known and distinguishable because of their designers, the way that certain jewelry or handbags are identified with their designers. This association implies value that is, in effect, consumable.

With the advent of global trade and travel, the image of a new tall building is immediately on the web and international news services. The buildings have cultural status now; they are not just tall, highly-engineered things.

You note in your book that signature tall buildings built since 2000 are no longer found in the U.S. or Europe. What do you suggest motivates those who now are planning and building 21st century skyscrapers?

By the year 2008, half of the world's tall buildings had been built since 2000, which indicates a huge increase in the design and construction of tall buildings. There are some interesting things that we can know right away: the majority of the tallest of these buildings are being built in what we would have formerly referred to as developing countries. Many of them are in countries enjoying the benefits of gas and oil revenues. Many are being developed, and in some cases, funded as icons of national pride. The 101-story Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan has been encouraged and is partly occupied and funded by entities of the Taiwanese government. The same is certainly true in the Emirates of the Middle East. A number of these buildings were built with the support of sovereign funds that are channeled from the government as well as controlling parties within the government. These buildings have a strong national and cultural significance.

Another sentence in the book's prologue reads: "Nevertheless, with history's authority and doubts, and the relation of theories of creative production under review, an examination of the tall building as a cultural artifact may give us a telling glimpse into the universe of our own intentions." Elaborate on the intentions of those funding the newest tall buildings.

Until recently, the tall building didn't seem to be a worldwide symbol of national pride and material progress, or a benchmark of achievement and modernity. But clearly, in the last decade or two, the tall building has joined the automobile and the business suit in the realm of the luxury product. There are several chapters in the book that drill down specifically into where this is happening. The back side of this story is, of course, that we in the United States, for a whole set of reasons, are no longer building the world's tallest buildings. Recessions aside, there may be planning, zoning, or environmental reasons for that or larger questions of aspiration and what constitutes a relevant symbol here. Perhaps it's not the world's tallest building for us.

You also mentioned in the book's prologue that, by necessity, you had to make a series of choices to include certain buildings, architects, and works of art that you felt would be the legacy of the skyscraper. How and why did you make those choices?

I was trying to deal with the fact that recently there has been such a profusion of tall buildings. Not surprisingly, however, there has not been a profusion of particularly meaningful ones. In the rush for uniqueness and identity, anything that hasn't been done before is now being done. If we haven't seen an upside-down pyramid, you can be sure that someone out there is doing it. If we haven't seen a lavender glass building, someone is now using it as a point of difference. This is not a question of morality but meaning. Because it is different does not mean that it is contributing to what we can learn about the building type nor does it give us cues as to how to move forward and improve the tall building in important ways. In the book, I exhibit a few examples of fairly outrageous form-making, but generally I investigate the symbolic, technological, and programmatic advances. In one chapter I referred to "vertical mixed-use towers." That's an evolving and new thing in the west. I'm interested in those things I consider to be a potential legacy and not just an indulgence.

With respect to value and design, you make reference to the possibility that the outside of buildings may now be more valuable than the inside of buildings in today's brand-name global media culture. Could you elaborate on that thesis, in light of L.A.'s billboard controversy?

A lot of the things that have happened in the development of architecture lately are about surface. Some of them, of course, are about environmental performance. Some of them are about visual effects, transparency and translucence, and some are about achieving decorative imagery on the surface of tall buildings. While writing the last chapter of the book and looking at how artists were thinking about tall buildings, I became aware that many forces were vying to use the exterior of buildings to exhibit content, visual and textual.

At about the same time, I was conducting a downtown design studio for the USC School of Architecture and I was asking the students to map the area around Staples with respect to various data. We discovered two very interesting things from the mapping. One, we discovered that most of the entities which owned land around Staples Arena were not registered in the state of California, let alone were they located in the city of Los Angeles. These entities were overseen by people who presumably live in other places and invest funds here. The second thing that was interesting was that within two or more blocks of Staples, and now L.A. Live, the value of the exterior surface of the building was greater than the value of the net rentable space inside the building. Mysteriously, yet somewhat suddenly, there has been an inversion in the potential value of Downtown real estate. Under these conditions, a builder could make more money by selling the exterior of his/her building than by renting the interior. Better yet, do both.

Having said all that, at the time that Tall Building was published there was this whole series of public conversations and litigation about what constitutes a billboard. Is a billboard a billboard if it has public art rather than commercial advertising? Is an illuminated LED billboard different from a conventional one? Do the tenants inside a building with signage have rights in relation to things put on the outside of their windows? Are illuminated signs an unsafe distraction for motorists? These are a few of the questions growing out of the battle for control of tall building exteriors.

Why do you suppose there is a lack of distinctive high-rise architecture in metropolitan L.A.?

Until recently, common knowledge had it that residential and smaller scale work was the more interesting fare in Southern California. Los Angeles was thought to be the edge of the edge where new things could happen and there seemed to be more freedom below the radar of the tall building and all the institutional forces acting on it. Understandably, the better designers were drawn to more freedom.

Somewhere in the mid-to-latter-80s that began to change. Some good local architects were drawn into the design of taller buildings, certain architects with experience from more urbanized communities moved here and a few building developers revised their aspirations upward. Architects from other cities began to design buildings here. Today, in an environment of global communications and marketing, every tall building is at some level in theoretical competition with every other tall building around the world. The bar has been raised. And the spirit of experimentation which pervades this place will hopefully begin to affect the larger buildings in an urban LA.

Having surveyed the globe, what are the conditions in a city or metropolis that inspire both the demand and design of the kinds of high rises that will qualify for your next book?

The answer to that question lies in the difference between a purely iconic tall building and one that is intelligent, complex, and iconic. We can march around the globe and look at many buildings that grab our attention or our senses with effects we have never seen before. Then there is a much smaller group of buildings that achieve an iconic physicality while looking forward. They are powerful; they are memorable and new; they address pertinent problems and draw their form out of solutions to those problems. Some of these problems are: how do we add density to the city and multiply shared use of our common infrastructure? How do we create an iconic tall building type which addresses the particular visual characteristics of each city so that all cities do not end up looking and feeling the same? How do we approach the design of tall buildings in a way which both reduces their embodied energy usage and minimizes energy consumption for building operation. How do we open up our tall buildings to take advantage of natural systems: light, wind, sun, humidity? How can the extraordinary progress we are making in the materials sciences be adapted to advance the tall building type? And how can we create more complex tall buildings which are vertically mixed-use and create the kind of shared common spaces which we normally identify with smaller horizontal buildings? These are just a few of the questions which the next generation of tall buildings will address.

What is the future globally of high-rise architecture?

It will continue to move forward. We have had a series of global events after each of which the viability of the tall building has been questioned. There were periods in the ‘70s and ‘80s where accidents in tall buildings from fires to earthquakes to failing glass walls created serious questions. In the early ‘90s, significant global real estate recessions saw a huge pull-back in the investment in such buildings. 9/11 was, of course, a bizarre and tragic event after which many of us received calls for months and years as to whether tall building construction and occupancy could continue following a tragedy of such proportion. But, in each case, the tall building has survived and continued its pursuit of height and innovation. There is a wide range of forces acting on the desire to be tall. Today we are in a capital crisis. I don't believe we are in a technological crisis, nor are we in an aspirational crisis, nor are we in an architectural crisis. I can imagine when the capital markets reconstitute themselves that the pursuit will continue for tall, and, in some cases, the tallest buildings.

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Architecture is always limited or inspired by engineering and the capacity to put together systems that architects can use in their buildings. Are these systems of engineering and opportunities ahead of the architecture, or is the architecture ahead of the systems today?

Architecture is a synthetic field. That is to say that on a good day, an architect sits in a position of overview on many other relevant fields. In the case of the tall building, he or she may well understand the dynamics of the city in which a building will be placed. The architect may also understand the occupancy or occupancies of that building plus how the marketplace operates to fill the building up on behalf of the client and its advisers. The architect should have a general notion of what engineering and technological systems are available or are being investigated to achieve specific goals. There are the inevitable codes and protocols and the need to provide leadership to a large and highly iterative group of professionals in pursuit of solutions which have specific performance requirements but at the end of the day must be seamless. So, vision is not limited to any one individual, however, an informed and talented architect should be in a position to conceive and synthesize vision.

Recall that the worlds of science, engineering and the arts are undergoing enormous experimentation and progress just now. Invention is a part of a successful tall building and insightful application of new technologies and strategies is another equally important part. I would say that as architects attempt to build taller and taller, the design problem will become more and more like the design of a high-velocity automobile. At low speeds, the vehicle can tolerate various and sundry effects and performance is not so critical. As the velocity reaches record level, performance is everything and the design cannot tolerate inefficiencies. Think faster, lighter, stronger. Or in our case, taller, lighter, stronger. To me, this implies an extremely close relationship between architect, engineers and the technical sciences.

I want to go back to the opening of Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper. It begins with three quotations. How did you pick those quotations? What is significance of placing them in the front of the book?

Those quotations are, in my view, about three different meditations on the tall building, under different circumstances, by different people, at different points in time. I wanted to open the book with the notion that there are a lot of tall buildings that have been built, or are under construction, but this is a unique book about the ideas of tall buildings. Thus, the subtitle: Imagining the Skyscraper. Many of the projects in this book are not built. They were theorized but never built, and perhaps they never could be built. I wanted to unmoor the tall building from the particulars of making them and think about all of the ideas that informed them. The first is from Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite Argentinian authors. He was describing, in literary terms, his fantastic and vertical Library of Babel, which ascends infinitely up and descends infinitely down and he captures the occasional vertigo of being in a tall building. The other is by Nietzsche and reflects on how glorious and civil it would be to occupy the top of a tall building, up so high that all the clatter and business of everyday life could not be heard nor seen. Rather monk-like and serene. And the last quote is a post-modern firebomb by Jean Baudrillard, saying that he is interested in monsters not rationality, suggesting perhaps that the city monumentalizes our fears and the incomprehensibilities of life. All these imaginations are in my view relevant to a broad conversation of tall buildings.

The title of the book, again, is Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper. Let's take the part of the title that follows the colon. You're on the faculty of the graduate program of architecture at USC and you headed the master's program there in the past. What are your students imagining when you present these themes?

They all seem now to be interested in the topic of the tall building. They are particularly interested in the ideas and history that attend the topic. To gain sufficient facility to begin to design a tall building is, however, a bit like learning to do surgery. I say it takes about a decade if you're lucky and a little smart.

In fact, it was about three years ago when I gave the most recent Tall Building studio class. The beginning of the semester was nearing and I decided to meet with the students and ask them what topic they would like to study. With no prompting, the majority picked tall buildings. So we had the first tall buildings design studio in many years. I was frankly surprised that they would have an interest in that notwithstanding my own professional and personal interests in the topic. For all of the smaller, sexier, and more intimate things that students usually enjoy working on, they were interested in tall buildings. This probably means that they had a high degree of technical skill, which students do now, access to vast amounts of information via the internet, which of course they do also, and it probably means that they were quite familiar with cities and tall buildings around the world, which they are. At the graduate level, there are a large number of international students, most of the students had traveled widely and there is a great focus worldwide now on the fate of the city. They were very ambitious to take on the tall building and I enjoyed seeing the high energy and insights they brought to it.