Book Review: “Supertall” by Stefan Al

SUPERTALL: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives

by Stefan Al

The relentless construction of ever-larger skyscrapers in New York City, “closing the light of the skies and enclosing the air of the streets,” steals citizens’ rights to light and air, “which they must demand, ‘in search of health, Happiness and prosperity,'” wrote David Knickerbocker Boyd. one architect has described the newest tall tower crop as “a threat to public health and safety and a crime that needs to be stopped.” Boyd’s view of the skyscraper as an urban plague makes it the lead that has recently emerged on Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan. It makes it look like he’s spearheading the offensive against a jungle of pencil-thin, ultra-tall towers. He could have done just that if he hadn’t died in 1944. Boyd’s jeremiad was built 114 years ago, when anything more than a dozen floors was considered a skyscraper and was the tallest in the world. Written when the building was Ernest Flagg’s newly completed Singer Building, on Broadway and Liberty Street, it rose to a height of 47 stories unheard of at the time. .

People are complaining about skyscrapers, not today when tall buildings have become commonplace and 57th Street has turned into a boulevard of glittering glass apartments higher than the Empire State Building. There is a long history of tension between cities and the towers that often define their identities. For most of his career, Flagg was an ardent opponent of tall buildings, which he considered both unsafe and difficult to make aesthetically pleasing. He had already designed a 10-story headquarters for the Singer Company, but when Singer decided to go taller, Flagg went ahead and greatly increased the height of the building by adding a slender tower that he hoped would show a building could be tall and not block the sun and sky.

Not everyone cared, and there would be bulkier towers than Flagg-like pins. There was a lot of money to be made to turn the skyline that once belonged to church spiers and the spiers of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City into a celebration of capitalism. The skyscraper may seem like a natural consequence of technological advances – the elevator and the steel frame that supports the great height – and the growing economic power of companies. But it also has a lot to do with culture and the willingness of certain places to let capitalism express itself with unlimited power, with enthusiasm.

It is no coincidence that the skyscraper originated in the United States, while this country has become a significant presence on the world stage. Building high towers was a way to flex the American muscles, to show the world that this country not only has incredible engineering feats, but also the ability to build entire cities around them. Brilliant engineer Gustave Eiffel could have created his tower as a symbol, but he did not reshape modern Paris. It will be in the comparatively cleaner pages of New York and Chicago that the 20th century manifests itself in the making of a new kind of skyline. And the skyscraper would become one of America’s most important contributions to international culture.

Much of the world immediately embraced jazz, another US export of roughly the same genre. Skyscrapers take a little longer to capture. They would remain mostly an American phenomenon until the end of the 20th century. And that’s Stefan Al’s current skyscrapers, often taller buildings than their predecessors, are more numerous and more widely spread around the world. Many are more daring in engineering than their predecessors: they are surprisingly thin and reach great heights thanks to advances in structural design. Some of this new wave of skyscrapers arouse admiration, but more is certainly resentful. First of all, there is less and less innovation in the concept of a tower rising more than 1,000 feet; now they appear everywhere and have changed the scale of major cities around the world.

That is the premise behind this book: This is not your grandfather’s skyscraper you see out of your window; The new generation of skyscrapers is larger and more common than before. What’s happened to the skyline in recent years has made the expectation that 9/11 will lead to the death of the skyscraper seem like a strange memory. We may not like all that this era of super-tall buildings has to offer, and Al doesn’t insist that we do it. Al, a New York-based Dutch architect who holds a post on the staff of Kohn Pedersen Fox, a prolific international designer of tall buildings, writes clearly. He understands that skyscrapers are a product of technology, finance, zoning, marketing, social preferences, and aesthetics, and that ignoring any of these categories is a misunderstanding.

Al divides his book into two main sections, Technology and Society: the first is a series of chapters about things like concrete, wind, and elevators; the second is a series of essays about cities – London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore – each presented as a case study of different political, social and economic attitudes towards skyscrapers. There is a wealth of history here, well and succinctly told (and illustrated with superb illustrations, a refreshing change from the big, splashy photos of coffee table books).

London is an example of an old and often low-lying urban fabric now infiltrated by skyscrapers, whose results are questionable; Hong Kong is seen as one gigantic machine, with towers clustered tightly together and an efficient public transport system running them all as almost an integrated unit. A place where the landscape is woven into not only urban design but also the structures of new towers, Singapore may be Al’s ideal: a dense, high-garden city. New York is New York, where the new super-tall and super-slim residential towers stand as a disturbing symbol. “How ingenious these structures may be, they are also signs of increasing inequality and social risk,” writes Al. He calls them “a capitalist, high-end world with one of the most expensive and luxury real estate available.”

Still, Al is often an avid supporter of the super-talls, sometimes to the point of exaggeration or cliché, for example calling them “cathedrals of our time” or “truth is stranger than fiction: that’s the story of architecture today.” But then the social challenges presented by super-tall buildings almost bring him back to earth and regain his clear and critical eye. In an era of explosive urban growth, he believes we must continue to build tall buildings, but argues that tall building alone is not enough: We must find ways to do it greener, healthier and more sustainable without sacrificing beauty. . He doesn’t pretend to know exactly how, but he knows we have to make the skyscraper more than “the machine that pays for the land,” as architect Cass Gilbert said long ago.

Paul Goldberger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and author of most recent Ballpark: Baseball in the American City.

SUPERTALL: How the World’s Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Lives, by Stefan Al | WW Norton & Company | 296 p. | illustrated | $30