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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 2002, Claudia Roth Pierpont on the construction of New York's Chrysler Building
"Heroic materialism," Kenneth Clark called the best of what the commercial culture of the past two centuries had made, at the close of his 1969 series "Civilisation," and he illustrated its triumph simply by standing on the bridge of the Staten Island ferry and peering out at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the spires high and gleaming. "Why are the public buildings so high?" another Englishman of the same Oxonian generation, W. H. Auden, who knew the squalid city rather better than Clark did, asked when he arrived. "why, that's because the spirits of the public are so low." Between these two views, a dialogue goes back and forth about tall buildings and their meaning which is rooted, perhaps, in the whole idea of the heroic material. (Auden was a Christian when he wrote; Clark was not, yet.) The tall building is the symbol of all that we hope for--height, reach, power, and a revolving restaurant with a long wine list--and all that we cower beneath. It is a symbol of oomph and of waste, the lighthouse of commerce and the outhouse of capitalism, the tallest candle on the biggest cake, and the cash-economy prison made up of countless anonymous cells. The Bible gives us one tall building and leaves it unfinished, and ends with a shining city coming down from Heaven, but never says how many floors its towers have. When the Empire State Building was being built, as Neal Bascomb reveals in his new book, "Higher" (Doubleday; $26), the motive for its height was insistently said to be commercial--it was more economical, and the spire would be a place for wandering zeppelins to find a mooring--even though everyone knew that the real motive was just to be . . . taller.
The big tall building, though it has never been away as a thing, is newly potent as an idea, with, of course, a new sense of vulnerability attending it. Three of the best of the season's New York City books are about the history and future of the skyscraper, seen less as an inevitability, forced on us by circumstances and to be shaped as best we can, than as a metaphor, in the phrase of Guy Nordenson, the essayist in"Tall Buildings" (Museum of Modern Art; $29.95), the book accompanying the Museum of Modern Art's upcoming exhibition. The skyscraper's history is no longer materially driven (elevators, steel frames, a narrow and crowded island) but epic and individual, the heroic work of mostly forgotten architects and engineers and even construction foremen. At the same time, the buildings themselves are to be seen less as forces of commerce than as constructed conceits. The burden of Nordenson's essay is that the tall building, treated as an engineering marvel and an urban necessity throughout the twentieth century, stands before us now as just one more figure of speech, one more of the "diverse 'speech acts' in the large agoras of our modern cities," albeit acts with elevators and insurance.
To say that real, big things should be considered as metaphors shows some doubt in their realness, a will to dematerialize; the moment a thing becomes a mere figure of speech, its bright noon is past. Miracles become metaphors when we no longer really believe in saints. Now that tall buildings are for...
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