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Skyscraper Construction

The conventional wisdom has it that the desire to build tall received a serious setback from the World Trade Center disaster. As usual, the conventional wisdom has it wrong. The reality is that we are building higher than ever, with buildings in construction, or on the boards, that dwarf everything we know now.

Superskyscrapers are proposed or rising in London, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing and Mexico City; they already exist in Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai and Taipei. While the earthbound argue about fear and safety, Asia has outstripped the West, using the most advanced structural technology and safety features for buildings already completed and occupied; Malaysia's twin Petronas towers became the world's tallest in 1998 at 1,483 feet, and the 101-story, 1,667-foot Taipei 101 tower broke that record when it opened in Taiwan this year. There is no turning back. This is the way it will be in the 21st century.

These dramatic additions to the international skyline are being designed by the familiar high-wire performers -- Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava are all represented, while seasoned skyscraper pros like Henry Cobb, Cesar Pelli and William Pederson have been quietly producing the first generation of superbuildings. They are all working with structural engineers who have so radically transformed the possibilities that the name "skyscraper" has become old-fashioned.

At least, that is the judgment of Terence Riley, the Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer and Princeton professor, the co-organizers of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. They prefer to call it "Tall Buildings," because they find the word skyscraper a romantic throwback to an earlier age when one considers the conceptual possibilities and structural innovations of today's enormous towers.

The 25 examples being shown in models, sections and elevations are on display at MoMA's temporary outpost in Queens, where they will remain until Sept. 27, after which the museum returns to Manhattan and its own new tall building at its old site on West 53rd Street. They range from a modest 187 feet for an office building in Santiago, Chile, chosen for its ingenious engineering, to a proposal for Chicago at 2,000 feet and 108 stories that would have been the world's tallest building if it had been constructed -- a title as fleeting as the clouds above.

All have been designed within the past 10 years, although only six have been built, with another half-dozen under construction; the rest were conceived as projects or for competitions. Three were finalists for the World Trade Center site: a pair of "kissing" towers by Norman Foster that meet as they rise and are a marvel of suavely expressed technology; a forest of connected leaning towers by an international consortium of Dutch, British and American architects that say come with me to the precipice and leap into the arms of tomorrow; and a matched set of minimalist towers joined with orthogonal precision by a prestigious New York team that included Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Peter Eisenman and Steven Holl.

A Mobius in their midst: Rem Koolhaas's design for the Central Chinese Television (CCTV) Tower, Beijing, shows how new materials and techniques are making bold, outsize structures possible as never before.

It is safe to say that as long as architects are possessed by a timeless obsession to build tall -- a universal ambition that can make even the most modest fancy themselves masters of the universe -- and developers pursue ways to wring every ounce of profit out of expensive land, the race for height will continue, limited only by how high practicality and this alliance will take them. And that is discounting symbolism, hubris and dreams.

There is, however, a significant difference between the tall buildings of the past and those of this new Skyscraper Age. Radical changes in architecture are the result of radical advances in technology. High-speed computer calculation and modeling of structural systems has changed the rules of the game. Surreal and sculptural shapes now rival more traditional towers of increasing decorative complexity.

The romance of great height is still there, whether in Calatrava's futuristic twisting Turning Torso, or Petronas's fairy-tale fruitcakes piercing the sky. The Möbius-like strip of Rem Koolhaas's proposed headquarters for Chinese television in Beijing is monumental science fiction. The traditional curtain-walled steel skeleton functioned like a straitjacket for space and height. These buildings are freely formed within strong, truss-like exterior walls, limited only by the physical constraints of the site, the calculations of the computer, the market and taste.

Instead of the usual stacked, flat floor plates, vertical groups of floors serviced by their own elevators and escalators can be arranged around interior atriums and gardens. Norman Foster's striking "gherkin" at 30 St. Mary Axe in London has curved exterior walls that minimize wind loads and air movement inside and out. Open, "green" space wraps around the office floors, visible as a spiral pattern on the faceted glass façade. Using new materials and techniques and sophisticated computer programs to calculate everything from airflow and thermal gain and loss to wind loads and stresses and tall building sway, these outsize structures are technologically and economically viable for the first time. Because they are far more energy and cost efficient than their predecessors, they can be promoted as sustainable architecture.

The time is past when the architect was the form-giver who handed an idea to the engineer, whose job was basically to make it stand up. Today's structural engineer is a coequal designer. But names like Cecil Balmond, Guy Nordenson and Leslie Robertson, and distinguished engineering firms like Ove Arup, are virtually unknown outside of the profession.

The exhibition argues that by acting as transportation hubs and shopping centers, superbuildings create street life instead of standing alone in offputting, isolated plazas. It has always made planning sense to include these facilities in large construction projects; the problem has been to offer the office or residential developer enough incentives. Evidently, size will do it. But New York's huge new AOL Time Warner building kills the street and standardizes the shopping experience with a giant indoor suburban mall of monumentally homogenized upscale ennui. Mixed uses equalize financial risk more than they enrich and enliven the urban environment.

Questions as large as the buildings remain. When does bizarre become beautiful? Some of these proposals, like Mr. Eisenman's Max Reinhardt Haus for Berlin, are acrobatic exercises in computer mathematics that only an architect could love. To most of us, tall buildings are not engineering marvels as much as they are icons of power and progress and objects of consummate wonder. They carry an extraordinary emotional and aesthetic message, an experience the 19th century recognized and revered in nature's most awesome manifestations as the "sublime." That doesn't have much to do with engineering developments like stayed mast construction or tuned mass dampers or fashionable architectural theory's elaborately stretched metaphors.

Inherently, enormous buildings are inhumane. This has become more pronounced as the means of production and the sense of craft have been replaced by complex technologies and more formal and abstract design that emphasizes a sleek, depersonalized scalelessness. Exhilarating and alienating, promising and threatening, their ambiguity is inescapable. Right now, the sheer excitement of being able to do unprecedented things overwhelms everything else.

Admittedly, it is too soon to judge, but some of the examples in this show that are most admired by professionals for their daring innovations and startling forms are grotesques; structures that lean and loop do not give us a sense of security or suggest pleasure on a human scale. As they ascend into the vertiginous high-tech stratosphere they leave us behind in the dust. It's big building as big brother; ambition as destiny.

It is only when they express "the means and wonder of their structural achievement," in Mr. Nordenson's words, that they succeed in visually conveying their unique power and beauty in terms that we can begin to understand, advancing timeless standards of art and symbolism as they explore the frontiers of architectural experimentation on a scale never possible before. The tall building is a gigantic instrument of market economics, but it still aspires to the sublime.

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