No doubt many WEEKLY STANDARD readers have heard the news about the “Big Bend” skyscraper planned for 57th street in Manhattan, just below Central Park. It will be a giant, upside-down U that looks a little like the St. Louis arch, if someone told it to stand up straight. It was an eye catching story that made it into several major papers and the Drudge Report—but it’s more than a novelty: The Big Bend is good news for New York, America, and the Free World. Democracies need to build more remarkable things.
The Big Bend’s plan is not to be the world’s tallest building, but to be the world’s longest. That’s a fun idea, in its way, but that’s not the real story. At 4,000 feet “long,” from the base of one leg to the other, it will be about 2000 feet tall, which would make it the third or fourth tallest building in the world (the current fourth-tallest building is 1,965 feet). Each leg will be about 20 stories taller than each of the Twin Towers.
Of the 10 tallest buildings in the world, nine are outside the United States, though eight of them were designed by American architectural firms. Six of those are in dictatorships. In fact, of the 20 tallest buildings in the world, only four are in free countries: Two in the U.S., one in South Korea and one in Taiwan. Of the 100 tallest buildings in the world, only 18 are in free countries.
Looking at the data, you would be forgiven for thinking the sometime in the last few decades, the Free World lost its sense of grandeur. It went to the Moon, and then decided not to go back. It started traveling on supersonic planes, then switched back to 50-year-old Jumbo Jets. It invented nuclear power, and went back to burning coal. And it built the most magnificent buildings the world had ever seen, and then started talking about how super-tall buildings were impractical and unnecessary.
In the 1980s, when a property developer (he now happens to be president of the United States) said he wanted to bring the world’s-tallest-building title back to New York, the New York Times mocked him: “Living 120 or 130 or 140 stories up in the air is fine stuff for fairy tales, but it has little appeal in real life.” More recently, a prominent architect published an op-ed calling plans for new residential skyscrapers in Manhattan a sign that “inequality has begun to take architectural form”: “architecture with a sense of social purpose is becoming increasingly rare. Society’s tendency today to sanctify wealth and celebrate the super rich is also the bane of the 99 per cent.” This well known, much-fêted architect calls the new skyscrapers “profane spires.”
Yet, over the last few years, things have started turning around. Private space companies are going back to the Moon, and plan to go to Mars after that. New supersonic-plane companies have raised money and finished plans for airliners that will take us from New York to London in three hours. And after a decades-long drought, Manhattan is building skyscrapers again.
“One57,” a new thousand-foot tower, was finished two years ago. Next year, a new fourteen-hundred-foot tower will be finished. A year after that, a sixteen-hundred-foot tower. And not too long after that, we hope, the Big Bend. (Will it actually be built? Only time will tell.) But if all goes to plan, all four will reside on 57th street, at the bottom of the park, defining a brand-new new north-facing skyline for the greatest city in the world.
It won’t just be new, this skyline—it will be remarkably distinct, starring a brand-new use of the oldest shape in architecture. If it’s built, the Big Bend will take its place among the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle and the Colosseum (to name a few,) as a building that’s shorthand for the city it sits in. It might even outstrip the Empire State Building, as the Twin Towers did for a while in the 70s and 80s. (And as their replacement should have: the “Freedom Tower” is actually a very good-looking building, but what lower Manhattan needed was a new icon, which the Freedom Tower isn’t.)
Dictators have an instinctive love of the monumental; they thrive on Potemkin-ism. In the free world, we can afford to pursue beauty and grandeur for their own sake. For a while, though, it appeared we were choosing not to.
Like SpaceX and the new Concordes, the Big Bend is an unmistakable sign we’re at the start of a spring of big ideas. Rejoice, therefore.
