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. In our literature, as in our judicial system, rape has often been presented as seduction. 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. Yet there is no escape from the contradictions of the capitalist city as an instrument for enhancing land values and corporate eminence, the skyscraper consumes human lives, lays waste to human settlements, and ultimately overpowers the urban economic activities which provided its original justification. Each new argument in favor of the skyscraper may incorporate some response to previous urban protests against it. The builders’ fantasies alternate with grim reality. As a result, a fuller history of the skyscraper reveals a century of struggles and protests against the tendency to build ever higher. 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. 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. 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. In popular culture, skyscrapers have also symbolized personal social mobility and personal sexuality for those who commission, design, or use these buildings. 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. 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 supertowers, remote and anonymous, like the multi-national corporations or multi-jurisdictional bureaucracies which inhabit them.
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
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