Welcome to On Verticality. This blog explores the innate human need to escape the surface of the earth, and our struggles to do so throughout history. If you’re new here, a good place to start is the Theory of Verticality section or the Introduction to Verticality. If you want to receive updates on what’s new with the blog, you can use the Subscribe page to sign up. Thanks for visiting!
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“You don’t build [the world’s tallest] skyscraper to house people, or to give tourists a view, or even, necessarily, to make a profit. You do it to make sure the world knows who you are.”
-Paul Goldberger, American architecture critic, born 1950.
"[The skyscraper] must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing"
-Louis Sullivan, American architect, 1856-1924
The Urban Canyon
It’s difficult to reconcile the inhuman scale of the skyscraper with the human experience at street level. In most Western cities of today, the experience of walking down the street is largely soul-less, with a relentless street wall rising up on both sides and massive towers rising above that, usually set back from the street wall a bit.
Hugh Ferriss and Religion on the Skyline
Hugh Ferriss was an architect and illustrator, best known for his charcoal renderings of skyscrapers in the first half of the 20th century. Pictured here is an illustration from his 1929 work The Metropolis of Tomorrow, titled Religion. This image and the underlying thought behind it’s creation ties into a larger trend around this time that saw religious structures attempt to re-take the skyline from commerce.
“The problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous...opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man.”
-Louis Sullivan, American architect, 1856-1924
Verticality, Part XII: A Never-ending Struggle
The preceding work has explored our history with Verticality and our struggles to escape the surface of the Earth throughout human history. It began with our context on Earth and our source code that developed in us before we became human in the first place. It then explored our subsequent history up to today and focused on architecture, which is an external manifestation of this inner need to escape the surface. The previous chapter brought us to the present day, which also brings us to the question: will we ever stop pursuing our need for Verticality?
What We Are Coming To
If you wanted to cram every possible building type into a single structure, what might that structure look like? It’s a hell of a design problem, and the image above shows one artist’s idea of what it might look like. It’s an illustration by Grant E. Hamilton, called What We Are Coming To. It appeared in an 1895 issue of Judge magazine, with the headline ‘Judge’s combination apartment house of the future.’
“You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is ... when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centres of economic life."
-Joseph Campbell, American literature professor and author, 1904-1987
The Tallest Building in The South
To hell with context. The artist behind the postcard above must have been thinking something similar when conjuring up the fantasy that was to be The tallest building in the South. I use the term artist, rather than architect or designer, because the building depicted hasn’t been designed, but rather imagined. It’s a non-functional idea for a tall building, rather than an actual building proposal.
Saverio Dioguardi's Tribune Tower Proposal
Every time I research the Chicago Tribune Tower competition, I run into this proposal by Italian architect Saverio Dioguardi. His design is wonderfully flamboyant, and it’s more of a monument than a building. There’s something eye-catching about the sheer audacity of it, however, which is why I’ve singled it out here.
Height Lineups and the Abstraction of Verticality
Height lineups like this serve to illustrate how important Verticality is to the perception of our tall buildings, and studying this example got me intrigued about the nature of drawings like this. After some digging, I found many more examples of height lineups throughout the past two centuries, and there are curious commonalities throughout all of them. For starters, they are just beautiful drawings to study. On a deeper level, they provide us with a window into the perceived importance of buildings during a given time in history.
Ryōunkaku Tower: Japan's First Skyscraper
This is Ryōunkaku, Japan’s first western-style skyscraper. Built in 1890 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, Ryōunkaku resembles a lighthouse, with an octagonal plan and a slight taper, topped with two setbacks and a pointed roof. The name Ryōunkaku translates to Cloud-Surpassing Tower, which indicates the importance of Verticality for the building’s landmark status.
James Wines and the Highrise of Homes
This is the Highrise of Homes, designed in 1981 by James Wines and his firm SITE. The project consists of a series of stacked levels with individual homes built throughout each level. These homes appear much like the single-family detached homes of suburbia, which is a curious mashup of typologies. Wines is using Verticality to re-arrange a typical suburb into a vertical tower, complete with sidewalks, front and back yards, and pitched roofs. This rearrangement creates some curious scenarios and experiences which are worth pondering.
The Earthquake-proof Depthscraper
Take a look at this design for a subterranean tower from Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1931. The structure was designed by Japanese engineers in response to earthquake concerns, so the building claims to be ‘earthquake-proof’. Technical aspects aside, questions abound regarding the experience of living or working in such a structure.
Verticality, Part IX: Man Upends God
The needs of man become more important than the needs of God
After the Renaissance, humanity would largely abandon our ambitions to recreate heaven on earth, and our focus would shift to raising up our bodies as far from the surface as possible. Rather than singular, largely empty spaces, our tallest and most ambitious constructions would become containers of stacked spaces, still with Verticality as the ultimate goal. We were beginning to escape the surface.
Anecdotes : Machu Picchu and A Fear of Heights
I recently took a trip to Machu Picchu in Peru, and spent four days hiking the Inca Trail through the Andes Mountains. The hike included exposed, narrow trails up steep mountain sides and cliffs, and the experience put me face-to-face with a long standing but waning fear of heights. It got me thinking about my personal history with this phobia, and how far I’ve come through exposure therapy.
Cities of the Future from the Past
It's always interesting to see how previous generations viewed the future of their cities. In particular, the early 20th century was a hotbed for this type of thinking due to the emergence of the skyscraper as a building type.
Superheroes and Skyscrapers
It’s a common shot in superhero movies for the titular character to be shown on top of a building, looking out over the landscape and the city below. I first took notice of this trope on a recent flight while watching Venom (2018), and I began pondering just how common this shot is.
Anecdotes : A Tale of Two Apartments
Over the past few years, I've had two very different living experiences. The first, a 48th floor apartment in the Financial District of New York City. The second, a first floor flat in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I loved living in each of these apartments immensely, but the differences between the two have taught me a great deal about Verticality and its effects on our lives.
Trinity Church and The Contemporary Dwarfing of Historic Structures
Height in the built environment is relative. A tall building at the center of a major city today is quite a different idea than a tall building was a hundred years ago. As a city grows, taller buildings will get built throughout time, and the meaning of tall gets taller with them. Buildings once considered tall get overshadowed by more contemporary structures.