lived up to techno-hype, the science fiction fixation on the sleekest of cityscapes to signal the future raises an interesting question about the technological city. The visual choices of film designers suggest, by and large, that the future will be not only shiny but also tall, a place where glass-and-steel towers frame urban airways through which the aircars weave. This is an imaginative leap, for cities over many millennia were far wider than they were high. Limited to five or six stories by construction technologies and the willingness of people to trudge up stairs, they draped over the landscape like slightly lumpy pancakes. Over the last 150 years, cities have been rethought and sometimes rebuilt in ways that prioritize height over breadth. Indeed, the vertical city of the real twenty-first century—Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai, Dubai—is itself a radical reimagining of traditional cities. In turn, science fiction has taken skyscraper districts as the most common jump-off for even bigger, higher, and denser cities of the future. For one example take Bruce Sterling’s description of future Singapore in Islands in the Net (1988): “Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks…. Storey after storey rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain” (215).
The mechanically powered safety elevator, thanks to Mr. Otis, is one of the two great transportation inventions from the century of steam, along with track-and-vehicle combinations like railroads and streetcars. Combined with the development of steel-frame building construction, the elevator gave Paris the Eiffel Tower and New York and Chicago the first skyscrapers, helping to make the towering office building a visual clue and then cliché for visualizing the future.
The change was not instantaneous. It took time for an aesthetic keyed to seeing magnificence and power in great horizontally spread buildings to transform into the admiration of the vertical. In the nineteenth century, architects designed and developers filled new downtowns with “business blocks.” Four- to six-story cubes and oblongs, they were meant to impress with their solidity. The best were magnificent structures like the Pension Office in Washington (now the National Building Museum) and Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building in Chicago, a massive cube with a slender campanile tower that anchored Michigan Avenue. These were buildings that covered and held ground, defining their importance by lateral reach.
The new apartment blocks that housed the bourgeoisie of Vienna and Paris after 1870 were of the same architectural species. Four or five floors high, they extended in solid, never-ending rows along the avenues and boulevards. In the walkup city, the first floor above ground-floor shops was the prime location—the piano nobile for Italian town houses and palazzos, the bel étage in French apartments. Inverting the modern association of height and hierarchy, the top floor was despised for its cold and inconvenience, not valued for nice views, relegated to servants and starving artists.
The evolution of skyscrapers and a skyscraper aesthetic from this very different starting point is a story told time and again. From the 1890s to the 1930s the vertical gradually conquered the horizontal. The Metropolitan Life Building of 1909 was still a solid block with a now more substantial tower. The Woolworth Building, which took away the title of world’s largest building in 1913, shifted the relative importance of base and tower. The big three that followed—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the RCA Building—drew all their appeal from the vertical. In the nineteenth century, “skyline” had meant the natural horizon of country vistas. Only in the 1890s did writers commonly apply it to the horizon line of downtown buildings (the first such citation in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from George Bernard Shaw in 1896).
The high tower has endured as the symbol of modernity and urban importance. If New York and Chicago had skyscrapers, dozens of smaller cities wanted them too. Nebraska and North Dakota completed high-rise state capitols in the early 1930s. Los Angeles (1928) and Buffalo (1931) built high-rise city halls. Before the Great Depression hit, the Baltimore Trust Building reached thirty-four stories, Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning reached forty, and the American Insurance Union tower in Columbus, Ohio, reached forty-six. “Des Moines is ever going forward,” reported one of its newspapers. “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the state like a lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
It was an easy step from Des Moines to Zenith, the fictional amalgam of Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Kansas City where Sinclair Lewis placed thoroughly modern real estate salesman George F. Babbitt in his 1922 novel. As the novel opens and Babbitt has yet to stir in his new Dutch colonial house in the new upscale suburb of Floral Heights, “the towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.” As Babbitt tells the Zenith Real Estate Board, their city is distinguished by “the Second National Tower, the second highest business building in any inland city in the entire country. When I add that we have an unparalleled number of miles of paved streets, bathrooms, vacuum cleaners, and all the other signs of civilization … then I give but a hint of the all round unlimited greatness of Zenith!”
With the aspiring constructions of Des Moines, Cleveland, and Zenith in the background, the last century has seen an imaginative three-way interaction between real buildings that have reached taller and taller, grandiose proposals from the drawing boards of ego-rich architects, and often beautifully rendered cityscapes from the easels of visionary (or hallucinatory) artists.
In the 1920s Le Corbusier—one of most self-confident of the design utopians who shaped twentieth-century ideas about cities—created a series of schemes for high-rise cities: a diorama and drawings for a “City for Three Millions” in 1922, the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) in 1924, and in 1925 the Voisin Plan for central Paris, which would have carried modernity to a shocking logical extreme. Artists struggled to stay ahead of the curve when technological capacity grew and architects could let their minds out-roam the practical and politics (not even Baron Haussmann could have done that to Paris).
Meticulously constructed and articulated, the miniaturized city used for shooting the background for the 1930 film Just Imagine had a counterpart at the end of the decade at the New York World’s Fair, where General Motors exhibited a scale model of a freeway-and-suburb metropolis of the future. Courtesy Fox/Photofest © Fox.
Artists struggled to stay ahead of the curve. The most prominent in the United States was New Yorker Hugh Ferriss, who staged a “Drawings of the Future City” exhibit in 1925 and followed with drawings for “Titan City,” or New York from 1926 to 2026, exhibited at Wanamaker’s department store. His drawings celebrated technological progress with ziggurat towers and sweeping searchlights illuminating urban canyons. The images can seem dark and foreboding, but General Electric and Goodyear advertisements adopted the same imagery, as did the miniaturized “Gotham” set for Just Imagine.
Rockefeller Center is a close steel and stone relative.8 The Ferriss vision was echoed in the sets and backdrops for the silent movie classic Metropolis (1927), inspired by director Fritz Lang’s first visit to New York, and anticipated the style of Batman’s Gotham City.9
The backdrops for Fritz Lang’s seminal film Metropolis reference thirty years of visionary depictions of New York and similar cities. Realistic skyscrapers rise next to fantasy architecture that recalls Pieter Brueghel’s 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel, while traffic speeds across precarious elevated highways and railways and aircraft dodge through the concrete canyons. Courtesy UPA/Photofest © UFA.
Dial forward to 1956, when Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper (“The Illinois”)—four
