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Edifice Complex Confessions of a secret skyscraper addict by Guy Babineau
When I was a boy in the late 1960s I lived in a beautiful southwest corner of Vancouver near the ocean, several square miles of virgin forest and the pastures and paddocks of the Fraser River flatlands. There are few cities in the world where children grow up in such close proximity to shorelines, streams and woodland paths. Early familiarity with nature made me take it for granted. I didn’t recognize what a good thing I had.
If I wasn’t riding my mustang bike with a purple, sparkly banana seat, strips of cereal box cardboard brushing against the spokes to make a fake engine noise, I was organizing games of Star Trek with the neighbourhood kids or drawing pictures. Carefully crayoned, outlined in black, fantastic futuristic cities took shape. Rayguns lit up the sky in between towering, pyramidal, tube-shaped and oblong buildings topped with spires, outfitted with landing pads for flying saucers and protected by force fields. Inside the buildings were elaborate terrariums, heated swimming pools and bunkers deep beneath the surface; to protect you from the rayguns.
From time to time, my mother would usher me and my kid sister onto the bus downtown to visit the central library. These trips always excited me. Downtown, as current pop chanteuse Petula Clark sang so convincingly, was where you could “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares”. Downtown was where we visited my father at work in the CBC TV studios or went out for dinner at the On-On Tea Garden in Chinatown. Downtown, there was so much happening around me that I didn’t have to make things up to stop from being bored to tears like I did at home, surrounded by all that predictable, eventless, unpopulated nature. Downtown was adventure, glamour, good times. And buildings. Well sort of.
When the bus swerved around the curve of a promontory overlooking the city, there was an uninterrupted view of the skyline. It didn’t look as Big City-ish as I would have liked. At age nine, the mountains and ocean didn’t do a thing for me. I was preoccupied with human achievement and what the future would look like. Certainly, I hoped, nothing like the frumpy cluster of stubby highrises that made Vancouver appear like a second-rate hicktown. I dreamed of superhighways and great, big skyscrapers that would put the mountains to shame.
To be fair, there were a few tallish buildings, although I thought they were rather pathetic excuses. The Hotel Vancouver was prominent, as was the Marine Building, both of them ancient relics from the 1930s. To me they looked like oversized, brown wedding cakes. There was a brief, false glimmer of hope around English Bay in the West End. Old-fashioned, worn-out wooden houses were being systematically razed to make way for new highrises, fueling my anticipation and excitement. I was massively disappointed. They were uninspired boxes, and not nearly tall enough.
The only indication of the possible shape of things to come was at the last bus stop before we got off at the library. The blue and green steel and glass wall of the B.C. Electric building towered above the sidewalk. It seemed bigger than it was because it dwarfed all the surrounding structures. Although built eleven years earlier, in 1957, it had a hint of Space Age. The B.C. Electric building reminded me of photographs I’d seen of Manhattan’s PanAm building. This was as close to a real skyscraper as Vancouver got.
Adolescence arrived like an uninvited party guest and made an awkward entrance. Clinging to it was its contradictory companion, self-awareness. I became disturbed by my growing, uncontrollable appreciation for the city’s natural landscape. It was the early ‘70s. I was surrounded by environmental activists and anti-pollution protesters whose moral outrage I shared, but I still yearned for a towering skyline. How could I reconcile my newfound affection for mother earth with my passion for huge urban erections?
When I was fourteen I grew my hair shoulder-length, wore a leather headband and attended a so-called free school. One day in 1972 we all painted our faces, went down to the Grand Opening of Pacific Centre mall and, to the beat of bongos, danced around the outdoor plaza. We were protesting the ominous new black Toronto Dominion bank tower. I feigned social consciousness to fit in. Secretly, I was overjoyed. Sure, the tower could have been taller. And yeah, maybe it was a second-rate rehash of the bank’s headquarters looming in Toronto, three huge black obelisks designed by Mr. International Style himself, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and built in 1967. But at least now Vancouver had a downtown office building over thirty storeys high. We took the elevator to the top floor and barged into an office. Beneath their whiteface, my companions frowned with studied self-righteousness. Not me. My mime makeup couldn’t conceal my joy at the view from what was briefly the tallest skyscraper in town. I glanced around sheepishly to make sure no one had noticed.
Throughout history tall buildings had been macho symbols of religion or capitalism. I was leftist. I was agnostic. I was in touch with my feminine side. This skyscraper thing was a perversion. I tried to shake it but I couldn’t. So I hid my ugly secret. Like a drinker hides bottles. For years.
I moved to Toronto to attend university. The CN Tower, the world’s tallest structure, had been completed the year before. Seen at a distance from the airport, set against a clump of shorter buildings, it looked like an index finger extended from a fist, giving God the finger. A contest was held to name the revolving disco at the top of the tower. The prize was a weekend in New York City. I submitted my entry form with full confidence. How could High Heels possibly not win? It didn’t. When they announced the winner, I vowed never to go up the CN Tower, a resolution I stuck to for the next seven years. Sparkles...I mean, really.
Unimaginative disco names notwithstanding, I did get to experience Manhattan that year, for the first time. I was on a field trip with forty fellow first year theatre students. We’d been driving all night long on a chartered bus, reaching the outskirts of New York City shortly after dawn. Our driver took us over the George Washington Bridge which connects New Jersey to The City just north of Manhattan. A majestic silhouette of towers eclipsed the horizon, spreading upward to the sky and outward to the south, bathed by the crystalline, early morning December sunshine. I recall it as clearly as the first time I had sex.
The face-to-face encounter with potent cultural events and icons during my first trip to the 20th century’s cultural epicentre marked the beginning of my aesthetic adulthood. MOMA, the Met, Broadway Off and On; but one experience stood above the rest. 1,250 feet above, to be exact.
I took the two elevators to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, going outside past a kiosk selling kitzchy King Kong keyrings. Butterflies swirled in my stomach the first time I thrilled to the view of Manhattan sprawling beneath my feet. It was twilight and the city lights shimmered like stars. I was standing on top of Heaven inverted.
Off to one side, with a chrome rooftop tiered and tapered like the hat of a Balinese dancer, was the Chrysler Building. It was a more dramatic and talented work of architecture. Erected in 1930, its 1,048 foot tall claim to domination over Manhattan was usurped by sneaky last-minute changes to the Empire State, which was completed on year later. Developers pushed the behemoth from seventy-five stories to eight-five stories, making it 1,050 feet high, only two feet taller than its more gracious rival. Then they stuck a 200 foot mast on top, ostensibly as a mooring for dirigibles. This secured the skyscraper’s reputation as the tallest in the world until 1972 when Lower Manhattan gave rise to the World Trade Towers. These two mastodon tusks of high modernism foreshadowed the movement’s imminent extinction. In the late ‘70s, soon after Chicago thrust up the even higher Sears Tower, a widespread economic recession halted the construction of really tall buildings, giving the tensile architecture of postmodernism an opportunity to slither out from under its rock and evolve.
The Empire State Building is one of many case studies in Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago by Carol Willis, a historian with Columbia University’s School of Architecture. This well- researched book is a worthwhile, informative read for experts or dilettantes alike who have an interest in architecture, urban planning or the world of finance. Willis charmingly mutates architect Louis Sullivan’s frequently misquoted, misconstrued dictum that “form follows function”. Considered the father of the modern skyscraper, Sullivan designed prominent office buildings in Chicago in the late 1800s and early this century. He actually said “form ever follows function”. His axiom is usually interpreted to mean that the purpose of a building should be manifest in its design and engineering. More accurately, he advised that the interior function of a structure should be the architect’s main concern, form following at it heels. Sullivan often adorned his own buildings with unrelated ornamentation. He was always at pains to reconcile his respect for new technology and engineering with his passion for nature. A man after my own heart.
The 20th century’s most renowned architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, briefly studied and worked with Sullivan. Wright instigated what became known as the Prairie School and is famous for his arts and crafts residential architecture, Falling Water and New York’s Guggenheim Museum, among others. Although he was dead set against highrise clumps in urban cores, he designed a few tall buildings including a gargantua called Mile High, which was never built. Wright believed that skyscrapers should be interspersed among livable, residential neighbourhoods, a sentiment with which I strongly disagree. I’m an advocate of inspirational skylines rising above the sedated suburbs, like the Emerald City of Oz above the field of poppies.
Willis doesn’t dish out the usual discourse about skyscrapers. Instead, she examines the economic equation adding up to their development and evolution, what she calls “the vernacular of capitalism”. Most commentators focus on individual architects, schools of style or corporate strongholds. They tend to take either a pro or con approach; pointy bad, flat good or vice versa. Willis is unbiased. Her approach is a socioeconomic study that explains why and how this particularly American architecture came into being. Like every other form of that nation’s popular culture, it spread around the world and procreated.
Willis briefly refers to the arbitrary and illogical association of horizontalism with democratic civic well-being and verticality with oppressive corporate evil, for which she deserves a round of applause. Sometimes the masses have been abused from near ground level. The gilded, pre- skyscraper, horizontal dimensions of Versailles, St. Petersburg and The Forbidden City caused more than one too-thin peasant to raise his head from tilling the field, scratch his chin and defiantly lift his hoe.
Grand edifices both squishy and stretchy have been the result of money and power. At the turn of the century New York City was the financial and manufacturing hub of the United States, responsible for more than half of the country’s output. Chicago, dubbed the Windy City because of its blowhard politicians not its weather, resentfully stood by in second place. Willis examines the separation of administration and production — i.e. headquarters and factories — that occurred in the last twenty years of the 19th century, and the subsequent hot potato of boom and bust influencing the up-and-down legislation of height restrictions in both cities. She notes that the uncontrolled construction of super-tall buildings always presages a recession. The Empire State Building, planned before 1929’s stock market crash, was completed when the Great Depression was in full swing and remained three-quarters empty for over a decade.
Environmental impact and aesthetic considerations didn’t affect height. The real estate market did. When overbuilding occurred, saturating the market, complicated formulas were established allowing height ratios proportionate to property size, with caps on how high the facade could rise above the sidewalk. This resulted in the “setback” look, the ziggurat-like and multi-tiered styles dominating skylines until the 1940s.
In the late 1930s, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe abandoned his directorship of the Bauhaus collective in Germany and fled Nazi repression. He landed in Chicago with a suitcase full of utilitarian, minimalist chic and reductive platitudes. “Less is more” is perhaps his most famous sound bite, followed by his cosmetic surgery to take the wrinkles out of Sullivan’s grand statement and produce the more youthful “form is function”.
Van der Rohe designed sleek, starkly beautiful ultramodern towers that led to the predominant, interchangeable look of the twentieth century downtown core in cities across the globe, spawning the likes of the B.C. Electric building. The American architect Philip Johnson, who would inevitably bridge the gap between modernism and postmodernism and pave the way for Frank Gehry, Michael Graves and their whimsical cohorts, coined the term International Style to describe van der Rohe’s hegemony. Van der Rohe’s success was partly due to revisions in New York’s and Chicago’s building codes, leading to enormous slabs casting giant shadows in windswept plazas. They look great at a distance but can be scary and alienating up close, which I love.
Willis points out that van der Rohe’s designs emanated from new materials and technology developed during World War Two. If entrepreneurial speculation advanced the skyscraper, technological innovation created it. Buildings prior to the 1880s were limited to about five stories, reflecting the maximum number of stairs people — specifically paying tenants — were willing to climb. They relied on coal or oil for heat and lighting, as well as natural light. The electric light and hydraulic elevator appeared, as did the steel girder skeleton, allowing greater height. The fluorescent light, central heating and air-conditioning led to drastic changes in the floor plates of buildings, and stretched them even higher.
Surprisingly, Willis forgets to mention the telephon. Mr. Bell’s gizmo was the main force making it possible to have the manufacturing plant one place and the head office another. Internal communications no longer required people to be on the same premises. Management became isolated from labour. White collar from blue collar. Executive from middle management. Capitalism developed a notable hierarchy and notably higher office spaces, thanks to the telephone.
The telephone was to the end of the 19th century what the microchip is to the end of ours, specifically its utilization in cellphones and laptops. Piece together the predictions of business pundits and you get this picture of the workplace of the 21st century and its office towers: they will be wireless, nomadic, non-hierarchical (except, I presume, for the people in charge) and dedicated to the flow of information.
Architect Ken Yeang, the partner of a firm based in Kuala Lumpur, believes that cordless communications will transform the office tower of the future into a kind of “club house”, rather than a stacked maze of cabled, connected workstations. Yeang provides a commendable, idealistic blueprint for the skyscraper of the 21st century in his visionary “design primer”,The Skyscraper Bioclimatically Reconsidered. The unfortunate title won’t ingratiate it to most laypeople but it will be of interest to anyone concerned about progressive architecture, environmentally responsible engineering and skyscraper aesthetics that interpret a location’s geography and climate. Yeang elaborates on emerging business practices such as “hot- desking” — shared work areas available on a sign-up basis to workers no longer chained to one location — and presents a prescription for viable structures that reflect the transitory, flat management style of new corporate cultures. He supplies several examples of recently constructed towers in Malaysia and China that incorporate his design principles. They look exactly like the futuristic buildings I drew as a boy.
Among Yeang’s recommendations for environmentally sound towers are solar panels and/or shade plates and external elevators, “people movers” that scale the skyscraper in a series of levels subdividing the building vertically. Each new platform would be a foyer combining indoor/outdoor areas, and gardens. Again, I’m struck by the similarities to my childhood drawings.
Yeang’s alternatives, if employed on a large scale, could offset some of the environmental concerns Western architects and urban planners have about laissez-faire standards governing the helter skelter construction going on in Asia. But sadly, he’s written a wishbook. It ain’t gonna happen. Asia now boasts six of the ten tallest buildings in the world, in Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Hong Kong. They want more and they don’t care how they get built, or with what materials. They just want them to be tall and showy. The East wants to do what we’ve been doing for over a hundred years. But unlike here, in Asia people don’t tend to apply a moral value to skyscrapers.
“Western society has a prejudice against cities, an urban/rural conflict which is a hangover from the Industrial Revolution when cities began to take shape. Cities are evil, unhealthy,” says internationally renowned Vancouver architect Bing Thom. Recent projects by Thom are the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, the Vancouver Aquarium extension and several of downtown’s more attractive towers. He also designed Dahlian, a city for one million people in northern China and is currently designing another city in the southern Chinese province of Yunan.
“The East has a different sense of urbanity because it has a much longer history of cities. Here in North America there’s a frontier mentality. People came West to escape cities,” adds Thom, contemplating Vancouver’s low-rise mentality.
Thom explains the complex range of issues affecting skyscraper development here. First, there are the “view corridors”. View corridors refer to specific points in the city from which the view of the mountains may not be obscured. Second, every building must pass approval by a committee of architects and non-architects, which may be democratic but aesthetically leads to the lowest — in more ways than one — common denominator. Third, most of Vancouver’s towers are owned by absentee landlords. They are investment opportunities for companies in eastern Canada who don’t give a give a damn what they look like. The result is a downtown core of “big, fat, lumpy, squashed” buildings, unattractive eyesores such as the Scotiabank, the Bank of Montreal and others of their ilk.
I can understand wanting to preserve the city’s natural beauty but take away Vancouver’s scenery and you could be in any dreary Midwestern American city. Buffalo-by- the-Sea. I seems a bit odd to me that we’re dwarfing the skyline in the interest of environmental aesthetics while wealthy outskirts cut a swathe halfway up the mountainsides and property owners veto rapid transit going through their neighbourhoods, resulting in massive traffic congestion and more cars per capita than Los Angeles.
Where the skyline is concerned, an intelligent grouping of taller, slender buildings such as the fifty-or-so storey beauty taking shape at One Wall Centre, would likely enhance the view more than the current hodgepodge of homely sadsacks. Chicago, my favourite North American city architecturally, has five of the twenty-five tallest buildings in the world. (I’ve been to the top of two of them, the Hancock Centre and the Sears Tower). They are well- proportioned and spaced far enough apart that the downtown doesn’t feel or look congested. Seattle, whose Columbia Centre is the 23rd highest skyscraper in the world, shares Vancouver’s geography yet has an exciting, dramatic skyline that fits in well with the surroundings. Why can’t we have an impressive skyline too?
So here I am, back where I started. I’m still hoping to see some really tall buildings on the Vancouver skyline. No matter how hard I try, I am unable to reconcile my fascination for skyscrapers with my environmentalism and appreciation of nature but I’ve decided not to feel guilty about it any more. I found a support group. The Web is filled with people who’ve built websites dedicated to the skyscraper. By e-mail I interviewed Jeff Herzer, the Chicago webmaster of www.worldstallest.com, a site devoted to new skyscraper developments around the world.
“Some people really don't get it,” he wrote. “They write to me and tell me that all these buildings are nothing more than an ego trip. They expect this is some kind of grand revelation. I tell them OF COURSE these tall buildings are an ego trip! Look at the history of the skyscraper in New York. A tall building is the ultimate expression of civic pride, corporate ambition and economic virility. Lately, its become a product of national pride. Some people love skyscrapers because they are magnificent, soaring works of art with individual spirits. Some people hate them in the same way they can't stand cigarette smoke or their neighbor's blaring stereo.”
In a television interview a few years ago the late humanitarian, intellectual sci-fi writer Judith Merril forecasted a Road Warrior future of self-sustaining, self- propagating corporate bubbles. She said that these one- company citystates will be surrounded by wastelands where the impoverished and disenfranchised — people unequipped for the new knowledge-based consumer culture — fight over scraps of archaic technology in order to survive.
It’s here. Artisans in central Africa sell their indigenous sculptures to tourists and carve Coke bottle icons for themselves, which they keep in their homes as fetishes of prosperity and good fortune as their friends and family drop like flies from AIDS. In Jakarta, people scavenging garbage dumps for reusable plastic make more money than most Indonesians working in factories. The most influential man in the world runs a software company and thinks he’s above the laws governing his country. How many kids in North America sport the Nike swoosh compared to those who wear the Stars and Stripes or Maple Leaf? I bet the office buildings inside those corporate bubbles will be really cool though, and really tall.
Worldtallest.com posts news about plans for a new Chicago skyscraper that will wrestle the title of tallest skyscraper from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Its first place position won’t last long. In the works is a truly bizarre edifice planned for construction in Sao Paulo, Brazil early in the new millennium. It will rise higher than any building built before it. The pyramid-shaped World Centre for Vedic Learning will house the followers of India’s Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who will use the forces of Natural Law to disseminate world peace and understanding from 1,621 feet above the barrio.
An artist’s rendering of the project spooked me. I wracked my brains trying to figure out what it reminded me of. Then it hit me. In Orwell’s great outcry against totalitarianism, 1984, an enormous, pyramidal structure soars above the bleak cityscape. It’s called the Ministry of Truth.
Truth is, I love skyscrapers.
Originally published in The Vancouver Sun © Guy Babineau 2003-2004
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