YOU WILL BE shocked to learn that architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New York Times does not believe New York City ought to pine for its long-lost world’s-tallest-building title. But it’s lucky the Empire State Building wasn’t constructed the way his argument is, or it would have collapsed into rubble the first time a pigeon sat on it. You might conclude from Goldberger’s article in the August 4 Times that he knows nothing about tall buildings–but in fact he knows plenty, and wrote a fine book on the topic. Nevertheless, his piece is representative, because you would be hard-pressed to find a critic anywhere in the country who thinks that the world’s tallest building is a thing worth having. And when the Establishment is unanimous, it’s a sure sign of trouble. The world’s tallest building (1,500-odd ft.) is today nearing completion in Kuala Lumpur, and other Asian skyscrapers will go even higher soon–which sets Goldberger thinking. World’s-tallest-structure lust is symptomatic, he writes, of “cultures that are in the first flush of excitement at moving onto the world stage”; of a “rising culture” that has reached a particular moment that “comes after beginnings and before maturity.” Thus Beauvais cathedral, built in the 13th century, was “a brazen attempt by height-obsessed French builders to erect the world’s tallest tower (157 feet).” Actually, 157 feet was the height of the nave, not the tower over the crossing; the tower was 501 feet. But in any case Beauvais contradicts Goldberger’s thesis. When work on Beauvais began, French Gothic culture was risen rather than rising; Notre Dame, Chartres, Amiens were largely finished; “Gothic art,” writes Louis Grodecki, “had reached and even passed its zenith.” Today’s Asian skyscrapers, Goldberger writes, “emerge more out of an international design language than out of anything specific to their place.” Fair enough. But when he goes on to assert that “the same could once have been said of the Eiffel Tower” he is wrong again. Eiffel’s tower was certainly intended to feel French; it was put up on the occasion of the 1889 Exposition celebrating the centennial of the Revolution. “It will show,” Eiffel said, “that we are not simply an amusing people, but also the country of engineers and builders who are called upon all over the world to construct bridges, viaducts, train stations and the great monuments of modern industry.” And surely Goldberger doesn’t hold that late 19th-century France was a culture in its “first flush of excitement at moving onto the world stage.” At last we reach “that greatest of all symbols, the Empire State Building”–which turns out to be, as Goldberger sees it, yet another specimen of “international design language” versus buildings that incorporate “anything specific to their place.” It’s true that the Empire State has the quality of quintessentiality, of not having been invented so much as discovered at long last, like a law of physics–the skyscraper. And as such it transcends time and place. Yet as Goldberger himself wrote of this building in his book “The Skyscraper,” “it was startling, but somehow not all that surprising.” How surprising could it be, given the extent to which it was shaped by New York City’s 1916 stepback zoning law? Given other New York landmarks and visions of the time–the Chanin Building, Hood’s Daily News Building, Hugh Ferriss’s luminous brooding skyscraper drawings? People saw the Empire State as pure essence of Manhattan from the start. Tall buildings do not reflect brazen, adolescent cultures-on-the-make. They emerge in fact (or did traditionally) out of eminently mature cultures flaunting their wealth, technology, design genius, and sheer radiant self-confidence. America no longer wants them, that’s for sure, or at least her spokesmen don’t. But that is not because we are too mature but because we are too passive and tired. The pronouncements of today’s cultural Establishment are based implicitly on a list of axioms. “The sexes are for all practical purposes interchangeable,” for example. “One culture is as good as another.” “Having a career is morally preferable to being a homemaker.” “Humans have an absolute duty to preserve every species in its natural habitat.” Ask an Establishmentarian to defend one of these axioms and you will draw a blank, because the implicit ground rules stipulate that they don’t have to be defended; they are self-evident. Today’s list derives ultimately from the proposition that race prejudice is wrong, which really is axiomatic and self-evident. Believing in that original axiom made intellectuals feel so warm and good they generated a whole raft more, and here we are. The Axioms List is the most important document of our culture. It underpins the New York Times and (more important) every mainstream TV show and Hollywood film and university and teacher’s college, every textbook and children’s story book. No thoughtful liberal would deny that the list exists, and you might even get such a person to sit down with a conservative counterpart and agree on the list’s contents (if not its meaning). To write these axioms down and publish them in TV Guide and a million other places would be a great thing; would give the public a clear picture, finally, of what the culture war is about. That we are culturally more mature and sophisticated than old-time America (before the late 1960s) is an Establishment Axiom, and an especially important one. The evidence on the whole decisively contradicts it. But Goldberger relies on it in his piece. I don’t believe we are more mature than skyscraper-age America; we do lack the sheer brute energy that went into a building like the Empire State. The whole project took twenty-one months, from site acquisition to the tenants’ moving in. And no doubt we would never have approved the project in the first place, if only because putting up the Empire State meant tearing down the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Goldberger would agree, I assume, that we are a “post-modern” culture. I have news for him: We are post-mature also. And we are a nation of sourpusses. Because we are a crotchety-old-man society, we find the exuberance of skyscraper builders incomprehensible and damned annoying. The sourpuss element has always been big on the U.S. scene, no question; intellectuals have always tended to miss the point of tall buildings. The urbanologist Lewis Mumford thought the Empire State’s 200-foot mooring mast was ridiculous, “a public comfort station for migratory birds.” Raymond Hood unlike Mumford was a great architect and he set things straight: the mooring mast, he said, was “a thrilling feature.” But if you’re not thrilled, you’re not thrilled; not a thing to be done about it. Nowadays the Mumfords beat the Hoods every time. I’ll admit there are items I would sooner Manhattan acquire than a new world’s-tallest building. I would like to realize the old modernist fantasy of using (just a bit of) the space between the skyscrapers–to amble around the sky on spider-webby bridges or ride an 80th-story cable-car. As a warm-up, would like to see some of the city’s flatter, higher roofs better used. Would like to visit a museum or amphitheater under a glass shed (and see a concert against lit-up spires under a glass roof and gentle snowfall). Would like to visit a gigantic aviary or ride the world’s biggest Ferris wheel on a rooftop. We don’t have it in us to do this sort of thing, but the wheel will turn and, who knows? The next generation might. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you something, Mr. Goldberger, in strictest confidence, critic to critic: The degree to which the New York City public retains that old-time skyscraper lust is, my guess would be, 100 percent. Critics, big shots, sophisticates, and “activists” are repelled by world’s-tallest-building talk, and, faced with this unified front, the man in the street goes along, for the record. But if Donald Trump had succeeded in putting the world’s number-one skyscraper back in Manhattan where it belongs (he tried in the late 1980s and was beaten back by community activists), the public would have been thrilled. Opening day would have seen the public celebration of the decade. All the sourpuss harrumphing in the world wouldn’t have wiped the smile off the city’s face.
