Reaching for the sky.

THE AMERICAN SKYSCRAPER--CULTURAL HISTORIES

Edited by Roberta Moudry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]45

The skyscraper is a slippery, paradoxical subject--at once (as Spiro Kostof observed) materialistic and poetic. Skyscrapers are more interesting as an urbanistic or social or cultural phenomenon than as architecture per se. Correspondingly, they are more interesting than many other building types to non-architects--and on the whole less interesting to architects.

This book of 13 essays offers a new take. The editor's introduction describes it accurately as a kaleidoscopic view. Limiting their subject matter to New York and Chicago between the 1880s and the 1950s, the authors, academics from several disciplines, nevertheless cover a wide range of topics. This is not a book about the architecture of the skyscraper, rather about its relationship with the city and the life of the city.

In some of the essays, the focus stays close to the nominal subject matter: for example, an account of the way that the professionals who designed early skyscrapers had to systematise their own working methods in a manner analogous to the purpose of the office buildings they were designing. Other essays deal with the emergence of the need and desire to prevent the uncontrolled spread of skyscrapers--then, as now, aesthetic and social control being exercised by the introduction of rules whose stated purposes, such as public safety, were quite different and less open to challenge in the land of the free.

Skyscrapers are clearly felt to be symbolic, to represent something, but it is seldom clear what. In Chicago, the first 'tall buildings' represented, more than anything, the large scale systematisation of office work, and so in some of the essays, the investigation of the life of the buildings is largely focused on this new phenomenon. Merrill Schleier, author of 'The Skyscraper in American Art', gives an account of the 1928 play 'Machinal' in which a young woman is driven mad by the alienating consequences of working in a skyscraper.

In this and other cases, the skyscraper is little more than a nominal starting point for an (interesting) excursion into an aspect of cultural studies. Sarah Watts' essay, for example, contrasts the public realm as a setting for labour protests with the perceived appropriation of public space by the corporate headquarters that towered over them.

In the latter case, as in much of the book, the skyscraper as a work of architecture is beside the point. And although the 'skyscraper problem' first identified by the American critic Montgomery Schuyler--how to make them authentic works of architecture--is an interesting one, there have been few good answers, and you would struggle to find many examples worth listing, particularly in the last fifty years. Yet they remain a source of fascination, with fans and detractors, but either way arousing stronger feelings than many other buildings. So it is not a surprise that this cultural approach to the subject matter--applied more commonly to unregarded corners of the city, in deliberate contrast with mainstream architectural discourse--produces equally interesting results when applied to this most in-your-face of all building types.

Skyscrapers clearly 'contain multitudes'. There is no attempt at a conclusion to the book; although I feel better informed, that kaleidoscopic view remains, and I'm still not really sure what I'm looking at.