Posts Tagged World news
Alain de Botton’s ‘temples for atheists’ have a foundational flaw
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Aren't believers just as likely to appreciate a shrine to perspective? And doesn't the Large Hadron Collider qualify as a rationalist temple? De Botton's doctrine feels a trifle holy
Perhaps emboldened by the success of the atheist bus, or his own Living Architecture initiative (in which top architects design desirable holiday homes), or the fact that he's got a new book to promote, Alain de Botton is now proposing a series of temples for atheists to be built around the UK.
"Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" he asks. "It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals."
Sounds great, Alain. But what are we worshipping?
"You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he continues. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective."
In order to make atheism more attractive, De Botton argues in the accompanying book, Religion for Atheists, its advocates should pick and choose from the aspects of religion they all like. So, yes to a sense of community and civic responsibility; no to persecuting gay people and abusing choirboys. And one of the things we all like about religion, especially De Botton, is the architecture, isn't it? It gets the message across far better than something like a book. Unless that book is the Bible, or the Qur'an, but certainly if that book is Religion for Atheists.
De Botton's first monument will be the "Temple to Perspective", a hollow stone tower located in the City of London, that well-known hotbed of religious fanaticism. Its height corresponds to the age of the earth – one centimetre per million years, with mankind's time on the planet represented by a gold band around the base one millimetre thick. It was designed by a young architect named Tom Greenall, who collaborated with De Botton on the book. Several other possibilities are suggested: a Temple to Love, which looks like a box whose facades are rose windows from cathedrals; a Shrine to Care, filled with little glass figurines of humans filled with blood, and so forth.
They come across like witty art installations, but would these follies – sorry, "temples" – convince any religious adherent to cross over? It's unlikely. And why couldn't a Christian or a Muslim enjoy the Temple of Perspective, just as an atheist can be stunned by Gaudi's Sagrada Familia? Architecture and godliness don't necessarily go hand in hand. The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the beautiful Cathedral of Brasilia and several other churches, laughs about the fact that he has been a lifelong atheist.
What De Botton seems to be preaching is his own rather narrow definition of atheism, with its own unified philosophy, set of rules and even architectural brand identity. It feels rather like, er, a religion.
To answer De Botton's original question, atheists do have their own versions of great churches and cathedrals. If the antithesis of religion is scientific rationalism, then surely its temples are the British Library, the Millau Viaduct and the Large Hadron Collider? If it's about glorifying creation, then why not the Natural History Museum or the Eden Project? What about the Tate Modern? Or Wembley Stadium? Or the O2? Or the Westfield shopping centre? Perhaps non-believers should decide for themselves what a temple of atheism should be.
Tall orders: the best film skyscrapers – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 26, 2012
Hollywood is drawn to multi-storey architecture like … well, like a colossal prehistoric gorilla is drawn to multi-storey architecture. From the caped crusader posing on rooftops in The Dark Knight to Phillipe Petit's death-defying walk between the twin towers in Man on Wire, here's a selection of the greatest movie moments involving everyone's favourite phallic symbol
Seville’s Unesco status threatened by 600ft Pelli tower
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2012
Spanish city could lose world heritage status over plans to build 40-storey skyscraper amid cluster of 13th-century buildings
Seville faces being added to a Unesco blacklist as building work on a 40-storey skyscraper begins to change the southern Spanish city's skyline.
The half-built Pelli tower is casting a growing shadow across one of the country's most-visited cities and over a cluster of 13th-century buildings which have been designated a world heritage site by Unesco.
In a report leaked to local newspapers, Unesco experts denounced the "substantial" impact on several historic buildings. "It is surrounded by historic conservation areas," it said. "There is an excessive and undoubtedly negative impact."
Among the buildings affected are the cathedral, the Alcázar, the Giralda minaretand the Archive of the Indies, which together make up the world heritage site.
"They form a remarkable monumental complex in the heart of Seville," Unesco said. "The Giralda minaret is the masterpiece of Almohad architecture. This will end the Giralda tower's unrivalled pre-eminence in the urban landscape."
At a meeting in June Unesco must decide what to do about the city's refusal to halt construction. Among the options is to place it on the "in danger" list, or to strike Seville off the list of world heritage sites.
The "in danger" list includes sites such as Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan and the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam in Iran.
The Pelli tower is being built on the site of the 1992 Expo across Guadalquivir river from Seville's historic city centre.
The 12th-century riverside Tower of Gold is another monument that will be dwarfed by the 178-metre (580ft) Pelli building.
Unesco has asked local authorities to at least reduce the height of the building, but pleas made over the past four years have been ignored. The organisation said it had asked the city "to halt the construction works and reconsider the current high-rise project".
"Attempts are made to offer help to places so that they can solve problems," one expert on world heritage sites said. "But there comes a time when there is no hope for that."
That time appears to have come for Seville, where the Pelli tower has already reached 12 storeys. "They are meant to be adding another floor each week," said the expert.
El País newspaper said the report had been leaked by city hall authorities, which it read as a sign that the new city council, which was elected last year, might try to lower the height of the building.
Rome’s Colosseum restoration sparks inquiries into contract
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 12, 2012
Shoe firm Tod's had struck a €25m deal to fund restoration, but this is being investigated
Italy's most visited monument, the Roman Colosseum, is suffering from "about 3,000 lesions", a government minister said last year. Sometimes, bits fall off, as did a chunk dislodged by a pigeon on Christmas Eve.
But the chances of the aged patient receiving emergency surgery receded on Wednesday when it emerged that Rome prosecutors and the Italian audit court had each launched inquiries into the award of a contract for the funding of restoration. In January 2011, the luxury shoe firm Tod's announced it had struck a deal under which it would put up €25m (£21m) for the cleaning and strengthening of the arena where gladiators once grappled with wild animals – and each other.
Tod's obtained the right to use the image of the Colosseum until two years after completion of the work. But the company's founder, Diego Della Valle, promised not to exploit his sponsorship for commercial purposes, saying he was happy just to give something back to his country.
The agreement has nevertheless been a subject of controversy ever since. And, on Monday, Italy's competition authority was reported to have condemned the procedures used.
According to a consumer group that lodged the original complaint with the authority, an inquiry found that Tod's should have been made to organise, and not just fund, the project; that it had been granted sponsorship rights for too long; and that rival bidders had not been given enough time to top its offer.
But the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, warned: "If, with €25m of private cash available, we don't get work under way now, we cannot then complain if parts of the Colosseum collapse."
Bethlehem’s church of the punch-up | Giles Fraser
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 30, 2011
The latest brawl between Armenian and Orthodox monks in Bethlehem is a product of Christianity's romance with buildings
It's become something of a Christmas tradition: the annual ecclesiastical punch-up at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This year the Palestinian riot police had to be called in after it all kicked off again, with a hundred or so Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks bashing seven bells out of each other with brooms. Apparently one monk was provocatively brushing somewhere that was supposed to be the responsibility of someone else. In this feverishly contested space, if you clean it then you are maintaining it, and if you maintain it then you are making a claim to owning it: that is the logic, such as it is.
Which is why the three church traditions that share the administration of the Church of the Nativity still can't agree on who pays for urgent repairs to the church roof, despite the fact that water is now coming through and damaging the building. All sides want to pay, and refuse to let the others put their hands in their pockets. To pay would be to own.
Of course, it's been worse. In 1853, a similar jurisdictional squabble saw several Orthodox monks murdered and provided the Russian tsar with the excuse he needed to start the Crimean war. That time the row was between the Catholics and the Orthodox about who had the key to the main door and the hanging of a star over the manger.
In part, this nonsense originates in a longstanding romance between Christianity and architecture – a romance that began with the building of the Bethlehem church and its sister establishment, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, under the direction of the newly converted Emperor Constantine in the late 320s. Since then the church has been responsible for some of the world's finest architecture. Who would have guessed the followers of an itinerant preacher, for whom there was no room inside the building to be born in, would became the managers of such a spectacular collection of buildings?
For some, church buildings ought to be treated as little more than rain shelters. From this perspective, a church is first of all the people. And the buildings – however beautiful and impressive – are a distraction, transforming the clergy into caretakers and turning in on itself the outward-looking mission of the church. This is how the monks of Bethlehem end up being so petty and narrow-minded. Church buildings have become a fetish, admired by secular aesthetes and those who want an impressive stage set in which to celebrate life's big events, but a drain on the resources and moral imagination of the church. What we need is another dose of healthy iconoclasm to remind us that the message of the gospel is not to be confused with bricks and mortar.
In my more puritan moments I have some sympathy with this line. You cannot spend much time at St Paul's without noticing how much the needs of the building can come to dominate, and how the worship of many visitors is really that of Sir Christopher Wren. But the Christian romance with buildings is still worth defending, not least because the story of Christmas is that God comes alive in material reality.
Christianity is not some esoteric philosophy. It is rooted in time and place. It begins on the streets before it points to the stars. And church buildings are an expression of the rootedness of the incarnation. Where it all goes wrong is when those who are so caught up in the running of church buildings forget about the purpose for which the place was built, and come to believe that the stones matter in and of themselves. When that happens Christianity becomes petty and narrow, all about who cleans a few metres of floor, rather than a means of imagining human life from the context of all eternity.
At this time of year, let’s thank God for churches | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 23, 2011
Believer or not, Christmas is a reminder of what these places of worship do so well – maintaining and expressing community
God has blessings, even for atheists. Chief among them is the British Christmas. Cleared of its commercial and religious clutter it has become the nation's collective version of a Buddhist sabbatical, an increasingly extended retreat into family and self almost devoid of externalities. It is a time when Britons behave quite unlike they do for the rest of the year. In other words, they behave quite well.
The preliminary clutter is ever more dire. Compared with any other city in Europe, London's decoration is tatty and hideous. The archbishop of Canterbury contributes a platitudinous musing on riots and St Paul's protesters, with no hint of meaningful conclusion. The prime minister declares desperately that "the United Kingdom is a Christian country" and that "we should not be afraid to say so", as if we were. His seasonal intervention recalls HL Mencken's maxim that "people say we need religion when what they mean is we need police".
Even Christmas shopping, once deplored as an irreligious commercialisation, has morphed into a public service duty, a dig for victory. "Hopes of Christmas boost for economy," cry the headlines. Analysts examine the returns from M&S and John Lewis like priests round sacred geese. Will Christmas save us from double-dip recession? The din of collective misery is insufferable.
Suddenly all goes quiet. Britain now stretches what in the US is one day off into 10. There seems nothing else to do. The volume of public life is silenced. Family is acknowledged before colleagues and friends. Duty is paid to household gods in an annual census of filial piety. Family quarrels are supposedly suppressed, while children and old people acquire a brief moment in the spotlight. We know of the strains and stresses of Christmas, but I wonder how many families have been repaired and rescued through its ritual kindnesses. What if there were no such moment?
Throughout history, church charity boards record the gifts to be made to the poor at Christmas time. They record the communal services to be performed, the visits to be made and donations acknowledged. Christmas is more than just a much-needed rest, it is a ceremony of domestic and communal pleasantry.
The festival may have replaced Easter in pre-eminence largely thanks to the Victorians, but it is none the worse for that. Charles Dickens' demolition of Scrooge's cynicism – A Christmas Carol is a harder-edged novel than any of its dramatised versions – captured popular imagination the world over. Like the Muslim obligation to hospitality, the Christian obligation to generosity at Christmas is near universal. It is not enforced or even formalised, but it is, and deep in Britain's cultural gene.
Millions of Britons do at Christmas what they never do at other times in the year. They become "pray-for-a-day" worshippers. They see in their church a repository of good neighbourliness without which the community would be poorer. The Anglican church has a genuine talent for sustaining this communal centrality through thick and mostly thin. This role in the local "establishment" is far more plausible than the state version.
Going to church at Christmas keeps alive a sense of what the Germans call heimat, an attachment to home and place of birth, a refreshment of roots, an acknowledgement of continuity and tradition. This Christmas is deeply conservative. As Roger Scruton argues in his forthcoming book Green Philosophy, it reflects a "desire to live among things that endure" that should, in his case, be harnessed to the challenge of climate change.
I constantly find myself in churches. I find them aesthetically appealing, a constant source of pleasure (or sometimes pain). They were designed for a liturgy of contemplation and repose. They are good places to sit and think, in a landscape where such places are in short supply. As Philip Larkin wrote, they are temples where our "compulsions are recognised and robed as destinies/ And that much never can be obsolete". This may have nothing to do with religion, but it is undeniably a religious legacy and I do not mind thanking someone's god for it. The world is full of unintended consequences.
As government continues to enervate and disempower communal life in Britain, churches retain their physical and emotional centrality. In most settlements, rural and urban, churches are hopelessly oversized for their congregations. Yet the great medieval buildings remain a dominant presence in the community, the architectural expression not just of its ageless faith, but of its ceremony, its history, its family life, its arts and crafts, its tithes and taxes. They are increasingly reborn as theatre and concert halls. Where else would one want to hear The Messiah?
The parish church is thus the one building in any neighbourhood that is worth saving, together with God's acre, the churchyard. Since there will for sure arise a movement within the church to abandon such monuments – under the cry "we are a church, not a museum" – there will be a corresponding need to champion their survival. I have no trouble with the German system of taxing parishes for the upkeep of the church (with a voluntary opt-out). The Germans, like the French and Scandinavians, enjoy a civic tradition that permits them to keep their mayors and town halls. In Britain an increasingly faithless land finds itself ironically turning to faith institutions as symbols of local cohesion. Long may such places survive. At Christmas we salute them.
Viñoly brought in as Chelsea looks at move to Battersea power station
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 19, 2011
Architect behind latest failed redesign for London's Battersea power station hired as creative brain behind developer Mike Hussey's plan for stadium for Chelsea football club at the site
Rafael Viñoly, the architect who worked on the most recent failed redesign for Battersea power station in London, has been hired as the creative brain behind developer Mike Hussey's proposal to build a stadium for Chelsea football club at the site.
Viñoly worked on the £5.5bn revamp of the Grade II*-listed London landmark that won planning permission last year, but the plan collapsed a week ago when the power station was put into administration after its owner, the Irish property firm Real Estate Opportunities, failed to repay £324m to its lenders. The 16-hectare site in south-west London, valued at £500m in October, will be put up for sale by the administrators, Ernst & Young, with Chelsea's billionaire owner Roman Abramovich seen as a frontrunner to acquire it.
Viñoly is collaborating with the architects Kohn Pedersen Fox on the plan put forward by Hussey, a former Land Securities executive. Chelsea has not made a decision to leave its Stamford Bridge home but has appointed Hussey's Almacantar vehicle, along with KPF, to draw up plans for a 55,000-capacity stadium to be situated to the south-east of the power station.
New York-based Viñoly wants to retain as much of the power station as possible, keeping structural changes to a minimum. His new plan is thought to be less ambitious than REO's 750,000 sq metre development of 3,400 homes, as well as shops and offices. The power station's distinct four white chimneys were to be demolished and rebuilt, as they were deemed to be "beyond repair".
But Keith Garner, an architect and member of a local campaign group, said: "Jamming a large football stadium against Battersea power station is a bad idea." The Battersea Power Station Community Group wants the turbine hall turned into an exhibition centre – a showcase for British design and manufacturing – with offices and flats on the upper floors. Garner held up the successful revamp of the former Dean Clough Mills in Halifax, once the world's largest carpet factory, as an example. He has tried to get Google UK interested, which is based in nearby Victoria and needs more space.
REO's lenders, Lloyds Banking Group and Ireland's National Management Asset Agency, are keen to recoup their money. Nama is thought to prefer Chelsea, while other potential bidders for Battersea include the Malaysian property group SP Setia, UK developers including Berkeley, Development Securities and British Land, along with sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms such as Blackstone.
Centro Niemeyer closes but row over arts complex continues
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 15, 2011
Architect's name to be removed from centre in Avilés, northern Spain, as a result of legal action from the outgoing board
For the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer this should have been a week for champagne and his trademark Cuban cigars.
But celebrations of Niemeyer's 104th birthday on Thursday have been overshadowed by a very public feud over one of his most recent creations; a spectacular €44m (£37m) arts complex in Spain that is set to close this week, just nine months after its inauguration.
Following an acrimonious power struggle between local authorities and the administrators of the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre, it emerged this week that the architect's name would be removed from the complex as a result of legal action from the outgoing board.
When the centre opened in March in the northern Spanish city of Avilés, the local press billed it, with a strong dose of hyperbole, as Spain's answer to Brasilia.
Arts fans and locals hoped the centre, dreamed up by the architecture giant behind Brazil's curvaceous, space-age capital, could help revitalise the city just as the Guggenheim museum had breathed new life into Bilbao.
Global celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey put in appearances at the arts complex, which had taken three years to build and was paid for with public money.
But the election of a conservative regional government in May this year, after 12 years of socialist rule, reportedly brought the festivities to an abrupt end.
The incoming government accused the centre's board, which is called the Centro Niemeyer, but is not directly connected to the Brazilian architect, of misspending public money. The government vowed to close the arts complex, after an audit of its finances.
The centre's directors, who rejected those charges, and instead blamed the closure on sweeping cuts to the arts – the result of Spain's ongoing financial crisis.
Speaking to US National Public Radio earlier this month the centre's deputy director, Joan Picanyol, said: "The arts are always in danger. It's the first thing any public budget will cut."
Picanyol argued the city's newly elected government was scapegoating the centre for years of careless government spending. "They are using it as a symbol of what has really happened in Spain. Spending a lot of money, glamorous experiments, or this craziness about having a cultural centre in any town, or high-speed trains everywhere, any small town has an airport, and so on," Picanyol claimed.
What ensued were weeks of crossed words and strongly worded accusations between the new government and the centre's administrators. At one point Niemeyer himself joined the fray, penning an open letter from his home in Brazil in defence of the centre which he had designed in 2006.
"I am still hopeful that the decision about its closure or temporary suspension can be reversed," he wrote, describing the project as "something I carried out with the utmost care and which … helped put … a Spanish city … on Europe's touristic and cultural map."
Niemeyer said the centre's closure would represent "the loss of a fantastic space for promoting major cultural events and for constantly fertile dialogue between different sectors of the arts".
Avilés' regional government has said it hopes to reopen the centre early next year, although it will now need to find a new name.
"The name was registered and belongs to the foundation," Luis Rivas, a representative of the Niemeyer centre, told Brazil's O Globo newspaper.
As Niemeyer prepared to celebrate his 104th birthday, the festive spirit was lost on the centre's outgoing president, Natalio Grueso. "I will not rest until those who have slandered the people responsible for the Niemeyer [centre] are held to account in court," he told Spain's El Mundo.
Liverpool’s world heritage status threatened by dockside development
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 24, 2011
The £5.5bn Liverpool Waters scheme has reportedly been criticised by Unesco team
Unless radical changes are made to a plan to build a series of skyscrapers along Liverpool's famous waterfront, the city could lose its world heritage status, according to a delegation of inspectors from Unesco.
It is a fate that Liverpool is keen to avoid as the world heritage status places the city that spawned the Beatles alongside the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. It is crucial to marketing the city to visitors.
The three-day inspection last week, led by Ron van Oers, left Liverpool with the message that unless Peel Holdings's £5.5bn Liverpool Waters project is radically changed Unesco will recommend the city should be stripped of the status, according to the Liverpool Daily Post.
Peel Holdings' scheme, which will be considered by the council's planning committee in January, regenerates the deprived northern docklands by building shops, restaurants and offices. The company has already reduced the height of its controversial Shanghai Tower (which aims to replicate the Chinese city's dramatic waterfront) to 55 storeys.
But sources said the inspectors were unimpressed by the huge buildings. The Unesco inspectors will produce a report shortly before Christmas and it will be sent to Liverpool council and Peel Holdings.
The company, owner of the Manchester Ship Canal and the Trafford Centre, has previously said it will not compromise any further on the scheme.
Speaking during the inspection visit, Van Oers warned that Unesco's decision would have significant implications for cities around the world. "The way that the world heritage committee will eventually rule about this case is going to be part of case law that is going to be used by the …committee later on," he said.
The committee will vote on its findings in June 2012.
Liverpool's world heritage site officially stretches from Albert Dock, which has the largest collection of Grade I listed buildings in the UK, along the Pier Head and up to Stanley Dock. It takes in the elegant Edwardian "three graces": the Royal Liver, Cunard and Port of Liverpool buildings, which have defined the view from the Mersey for almost a century.
Dresden lost its world heritage site status two years ago after building a bridge over the river Elbe.
Liverpool council's leader, Joe Anderson, said: "I think we can reach a compromise, but Peel have already compromised. I think the scheme is a game changer. It's a catalyst for regeneration for years to come, that is how important it is."
This year, an independent report commissioned by English Heritage warned the waterfront could lose its world heritage status because of the development plans. But Professor Michael Parkinson of Liverpool John Moores University said given a choice of no development in north Liverpool and losing the world heritage status, it was a no-brainer.
"Without doubt, it is a very good thing to have the world heritage status and I'm sure it's helpful in sharpening the city's image," he said. "But we cannot be preserved in aspic and we have to have development."
In the past decade, the city centre and waterfront have developed beyond recognition.
"It is good to have world heritage status, but we must also have development, and investment in north Liverpool is tremendously important. But it would be a pity if the plaque on the waterfront was taken away."
He praised the development on the waterfront with the Kings Dock, Arena and museum but said that north Liverpool "is the nut we still have to crack" in terms of development and economic growth.
Tourism is worth £3bn to the economy in Liverpool and 42,000 jobs depend on it. When visitors are asked why they come to Liverpool, many cite the world heritage and capital of culture designations.
A spokesperson for Unesco refused to confirm the delegation's finding during the visit: "We don't issue statements or discuss the finding of such missions as they are first presented to the world heritage committee."
Skyscrapers aren’t always about corporate pride before a fall | Owen Hatherley
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 13, 2012
From the Empire State to the Burj Khalifa, skyscrapers predict recession. But not all towers are built by phallic capitalism
Tall buildings inviting accusations of hubris is as old as the Tower of Babel. The report this week from Barclays Capital merely puts an official stamp on the latest permutation of the myth, via a theory that has been around for at least a decade – the skyscraper index, which places the completion – or the proposal, it's not entirely clear – of a "world's tallest" tower as the sign of an incoming recession or financial crisis.
Empirically, it's true enough; skyscrapers were born of crisis in 1870s Chicago and New York, and most famous towers can be instantly tied to a collapse of some sort. The "Empty State Building", as the Empire State Building was dubbed, was finished in the Depression's deepest depths; the World Trade Centre and the Sears Tower neatly coincided with the end of the postwar settlement; the Petronas Towers accompanied the Asian crash of 1997. The current tallest, the Burj Khalifa, is self-explanatory in that sense, as its name – formerly the Burj Dubai – immortalises the bailout that the emirate received from Abu Dhabi when its bubble burst. Yet the skyscraper index has been around for so long that skyscraper designers are surely partly conscious of it. The largest residential tower in the world, also in Dubai, was quietly completed a couple of years ago. It was named the Index.
The reason why it is skyscrapers, as opposed to say, cathedral spires or telecommunications towers (which are frequently taller) that form the index are to do with what makes a skyscraper, and what differentiates it from a mere tower, office block or high-rise. The skyscraper came into being through a combination of innovation and accident, in a cauldron of unregulated capitalism. It became so tall because of rising land values on the tight, dense grids of New York and Chicago (the two cities still dispute ownership of the first skyscraper). It could get that tall because of two already extant inventions, the elevator and the steel frame, the latter used from Liverpool to Sheerness in the first half of the 19th century.
As to why these non-load bearing walls, merely tacked onto the frame, needing little craftsmanship, easily prefabricated, were so seductive to developers – well, one theory has it that the first skyscraper coincided with a strike of Chicago building workers. The towers were invariably offices, often for financial institutions, so were uniquely closely pegged to boom and bust. It bears repeating that in the middle of all this, nobody had ever deliberately intended, let alone "designed" the skyscraper – it was an effect, not an expression, of unstable financialised capitalism. This is, incidentally, one reason why the 1945-79 period was heavier on famous residential high-rises than luxurious corporate skyscrapers, at least in Europe.
Of course, there were soon attempts to consciously create skyscrapers, to make them into coherent pieces of architecture; in the 1880s, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan aimed to make of them a "proud and soaring thing", stripping off prefab baroque and applying his own original, deliberately height-emphasising ornament – but this "Chicago school" was always outnumbered by the mere stacking of Venetian, gothic or baroque detail up to 50 storeys. The result was the weird, retro-futurist towers that now appear as fascinatingly cranky as all obsolete technology, although at the time they were the ruthless expression of unmediated commercialism.
A couple of decades after Sullivan, Le Corbusier tried to create a becalmed "Cartesian skyscraper", largely for housing, leaving green space rather than traffic canyons underneath it. Not sufficiently flashy, the Cartesian skyscraper was eventually given the lumpy, prosaic English name of tower block. Accordingly, if you look at the current south London skyline, the ludicrously overpowering, overscaled, overpriced Shard is a skyscraper in its purest form; the Guy's hospital tower, next to it, is a mere high-rise. It's made of concrete, it's inexpensive and, worst of all, it serves a useful function.
All the record-setting buildings seem to have been equally useless, no matter how seductive their architecture. In the late 1940s, eight very tall skyscrapers in Europe were built, the tallest in the continent for three decades. They didn't coincide with any crisis, any financial exuberance, though their steel frames caked in pseudo-historical ornament immediately evoked 1910s New York. They were, respectively, housing towers, a university, a couple of ministries, a hotel and a "palace of culture"; the point was to build them, not what went in them, but in the process, the skyscraper stopped being stacked speculation. These skyscrapers, in Moscow and Warsaw, were an expression of ruthless dominance, but had certain curious differences. Some were and are open to the public. They were supposed to stand as points of orientation in the city, carefully planned. They were surrounded by squares and public space. Stalinists over stockbrokers might not seem like much of an improvement, but these ex-record breakers might remind us that the skyscraper need not be a combination of corporate phallus and crisis prediction instrument.
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