When it comes to skyscrapers I am, in the proper sense of the word, ambivalent: I hate them for all the obvious reasons – sometimes a cigar may be just a cigar, but a skyscraper is always a big swaying dick vaunting the ambitions of late capitalism to reduce the human individual to the status and the proportions of a submissive worker ant. Architecturally skyscrapers are the most meretricious of structures; predicated not on the possible realisation of any aesthetic ideal, but on the actualisation of specific construction technologies. In syllogistic lock-step with Mount Everest – which was climbed simply “because it was there” – they are there … simply because. And following on from the cast-iron frame method that allowed for the first skyscrapers to be raised in the late 19th century, each successive wave of innovation has been incorporated into further erectile capability. The current architectural zeitgeist, whereby form invariably follows finance, finds its purest expression in the skyscrapers de nos jours, with their parametrically designed waveforms that positively billow with opportunism.

Yet I also love them – truly, I do. I love their Promethean swagger; I love their ability to transform our perception of the city by proposing a new parallax around which we instantly reorient as we tunnel along at ground level. And I love the way that they are seemingly purpose-built to accompany what Marshall McLuhan described as the “instantaneous medium” of electricity. By day, Renzo Piano’s Shard is an almost frantically undistinguished building; far from being the mirrored sliver thrust into the skyline its designer envisaged, its dirt-dappled haunches hunker down on top of London Bridge station, surely straining even the notable credulity of the City commuters who, morning and evening, gaze up at its exposed giant bolts. But by night, through the window of the bedroom where I sleep – a room into which I have moved to enjoy it – I thrill to the sight of this Orion’s dagger, dropped from the jet-howling darkness to quiver and wink in the sodium-lit belly of the urban beast; and I hearken – like the good global tribalist that I am – to the message of this medium: to look upon the Shard is, perforce, to worship it.

Toby Maguire as Spiderman in Spider-Man 2. Photograph: MELISSA MOSELEY/AP

Shortly after the topping-out ceremony for the Shard, a squib appeared in Private Eye. There is a regular feature in the Eye called “Lookalikes” that invites readers to send in two photographs that foreground a resemblance between disparate people. Usually one of the individuals will be a politician or similar worthy, and the other a popular entertainer, so the intent is obvious: to denigrate the former by association with the latter. The images are always accompanied by a reader’s letter that follows a formula: “has anyone else noticed the resemblance between X and Y, I wonder if by any chance they may be related?” So it was that a postage stamp-sized photo of the Shard appeared, next to an equally grainy illustration of the four-pronged tower inhabited by the wizard Saruman in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; and the reader’s letter of course read: “has anyone else noticed the resemblance between the Shard and Isengard, I wonder if by any chance they may be related?”



Setting to one side fantastical nit-picking – Isengard is the name of the entire fortress, the central tower is in fact called Orthanc – this struck me as a very funny trope indeed, and I’m still laughing nearly three years later. Like all the best visual jokes, this one establishes an antinomy: perceptually the two buildings are startlingly similar, but conceptually they couldn’t be further removed. Or could they? What makes the joke continue to resonate is the way the mind goes on bouncing between the two towers, delineating a complex interlacing of correspondences, until forced to the conclusion that, yes, they must indeed be related.

King Kong atop the Empire State Building (1933). Photograph: RKO/Allstar

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I am a child of two cities with markedly different edifice complexes. My mother was a New Yorker who grew up in Queens; my father, a Londoner, born in the southern suburb of Blackheath. As they were growing up in the 1920s and 30s, both would have had good long-distance views of their respective burgeoning metropolitan centres, with this key difference: until the late 60s, Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral remained far and away the most salient building on the London skyline: a baroque salver cover beneath which lay church and state disjointed. London had an early flirtation with the skyscraper: Queen Anne’s Mansions in Petty France, Westminster, was raised at first to 12 storeys in 1873 and a further two were added in the early 1890s. Equipped with hydraulic lifts by their enterprising developer, Henry Alers Hankey, the Mansions were at once a cynosure of the new urban lifestyle – tenants included Edward Elgar – and a focus of the most intense disapproval, not least from Queen Victoria, whose royal prerogative, she felt, included an unobstructed view of the Houses of Parliament from her back garden. The architectural historian Harold Clunn said of the Mansions, “it is for real ugliness unsurpassed by any other great building in all London”. The 1894 London Building Act, with its 80ft height limit, was a direct result of this genteel disapprobation; an ordinance that remained in place until it was waived in 1963 – essentially by prime ministerial fiat – so as to allow Conrad Hilton to raise his Park Lane hotel to 28 storeys. When I was a child, in the 1960s and 70s, central London remained a mostly low-rise zone, with Millbank Tower, the Shell Centre and Harry Hyams’s Centre Point (designed by Richard Seifert) the notable exceptions.

Whereas in the US the popular perception of the skyscraper coalesced around the “international style” office block, in Britain the field remained clear for the late arrival of Le Corbusier’s machines for living: system-built structures, many prefabricated by the French engineering company Camus, that came stalking ashore in the late 1950s and early 60s. Although they were initially hailed in the spirit their planners intended – as harbingers of the new, the classless and the progressive – the collapse of Ronan Point, the 22-storey residential tower in Newham, east London, in 1968, marked a definitive break between optimistic postwar futurism and the subsequent enduring association in British popular culture of the skyscraper with high levels of social anomie. This linkage had already been welded by Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, with its urine-smelling and graffiti-bedizened high rises. This seems woefully unfair: Ronan Point collapsed almost certainly because of construction errors, but underlying any consideration of the practical merits of these buildings lay the deep-rooted conflict between Ebenezer Howard’s bucolical – and low rise – Garden City movement and its modernist rivals; a conflict that goes back to at least the period during which Queen Anne’s Mansions humped up above the horizon, when, in cultural form, it was played out in the oppositional views of the city enshrined on the one hand in the scientific romances of HG Wells, and on the other by the retro-feudal fantasising of William Morris’s News from Nowhere. No Wellsian prospect of the distant future is complete without a full complement of megastructures; the author understood with deep and intuitive force that the technological extension of human capabilities would brook no opposition. An urbanism defined by the high-piling of the species was a propositional inevitability of the form: “Have pile driver – will drive piles”.

Illustration by Eric Petersen

The British disaffection with the high rise as an instrument of social change – up-thrusting the proletariat – led, post-Ronan Point, to a razing of these skyscrapers. To take Merseyside for example, some 80 blocks were demolished in a 20-year period from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. For a while, in 2003-4, I had the tenancy of the highest flat in Liverpool; from the 23rd storey of this block at the back of Lime Street station, I could see as far as Mount Snowdon, 70 miles to the south. All around me extended the echoic emptiness not only of the block – that by then had fewer than 100 residents – but also the city, which had lost more than half its population since 1945.

I had been allocated the apartment as part of an art project, and typing a novella on my manual machine in its gutted shell, I was conscious of acting out an adaptation of JG Ballard’s High Rise (1975). This novel recasts the spatial analogue of class warfare – ingrained in the British popular imagination of the skyscraper – as an emblem for the age of evolutionary psychology. The opening line is a synecdoche: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” The eponymous high rise – in a familiar instance of Ballard’s prescience – has been built on the Isle of Dogs site soon to be occupied by One Canada Square (popularly known as Canary Wharf); the blank-faced 50-storey block designed by César Pelli that became in the 1990s the concretisation of London’s financial Big Bang, synonymous with the full alignment of British society with neoliberal finance capitalism – and the concomitant eastward expansion of the City of London – and which remained the tallest building in Britain until the completion of the Shard. Ballard’s building is socially stratified, with the less affluent tenants on the lower floors, and the penthouse occupied by the architect-developer himself. As class warfare breaks out between lower and upper floors, and the building becomes wilfully sealed off from the surrounding city, the protagonist, Laing, embarks on a journey upwards that is less an exercise in social climbing than a phylogenetic descent from the crown of the evolutionary tree to its roots in primitivism. Hence the dog-roast.

The Shard in London. Photograph: Alamy

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Ballard understood that the role played by the skyscraper in the collective unconscious is to do with its alteration of the traditional proportions of domestic life. In this he follows Lévi-Strauss who observed that “all distortions in scale sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible”. Whether very small, as in an architect’s model of a skyscraper; or very large – the skyscraper itself – the important factor is the loss of the felt experience. Of course, the actual myths that enshroud the cloudy summits of multistorey buildings are necessarily banal in secular Britain, quite as much as they are in the more plangent and religiously revanchist climate of the US. Nevertheless, Huxley when he opens Brave New World by limning the Central London Hatchery as: “A squat grey building of only 34 storeys”; Orwell, when he embeds the Ministry of Truth in a repurposed version of London University’s Senate House (the tallest unconsecrated building in prewar central London); HG Wells, William Morris, Burgess and Ballard himself – all are operating within the unified field of the same foundational myth: that of the tower of Babel, from Genesis, a tale of human hubris:

… Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth …

The Tower of Babel (1563). Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

Any and all skyscrapers are anthropic subversions of the godly perspective – attempts to realise the entirety of human life within the built environment – and hubristic affronts to our Maker and his transcendent Will, for: “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”. The British dichotomies – bucolic/urban, high rise/low rise; proletarian/bourgeois – all are mere spin-offs, subsumed to this primary one: our will/His; and its moral concomitant: good/evil. Naturally it follows that God’s razing of the Tower of Babel recapitulates that earlier toppling from a peak perspective: Lucifer’s jump, and its sequel: the apple of knowledge plummeting from a higher branch of the phylogenetic tree down into Eve and Adam’s moistened mouths as they loiter between its roots.

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The starts and fits with which skyscrapers were raised in the US may have been a response to boom-and-bust economic cycles, while the floor plans of the late 19th-century skyscrapers – featuring individual worker-bee cells, each equipped with its own electric lighting, window and ventilation – served a sanitary conception of social advance; the buildings’ hydraulic elevators literally lifted their clerkly tenants out of disease. However, New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution – unlike London’s late-Victorian stricture – imposed only formal patterning on skyscrapers, and a fixed ratio between plot size and tower footprint, rather than restricting height per se. From the top floor observatory of hindsight we can see the evolution of the set-back design of New York and then Chicago skyscrapers not as a response to the problem of human air-rights, but as the unconscious construction of a staircase fit for King Kong. True, the giant ape swarms up the facade of the Empire State Building, yet once he nears the top, he is able to hold Ann Darrow out in front of him, all the better to perform his snuffling inter-species totenlieder. In my memory Kong is always enormous, fully the equal of the man-made peak he scales. Still, every time I review the scene I am shocked by how he is dwarfed by the Empire State far more than Darrow is by him. Kong is us – or, rather, Kong is the prototypical superhuman of 20th-century myth, and at least fleetingly the skyline of Manhattan is his jungle gym.

Kong was thus the way-finder for Batman, Superman, Ironman and all who followed on behind, each of whom is attempting to reapprehend the intelligible with their magically enhanced sensibilities. Indeed, flipping through back issues of Marvel and DC Comics it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the entire genre exists largely as an unconscious response to the skyscraper. Frame after frame features these limber figures leaping, back-flipping and curvetting over row after row of Mies van der Rohe; that Kong himself was a personification of the re-insemination of the machine age by the primitive necessitates his own penetration by .50 calibre machine gun bullets synchronised to fire through diaphanous aeroplane propellers.

Construction workers eat lunch atop a steel beam, 800ft above ground, at the building site of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Like a window cleaner’s cradle dangling from a davit in high wind, American popular culture can’t help letting it all hang out. The recrudescence of the Athenian polis in the spatialisation of the Manhattan skyline – a solid block of concrete, steel and masonry neatly sliced into democratically accountable chunks – brought with it the original Grecian sin: hubris. In the film The Towering Inferno, as the fuse cupboards explode and flames wasp-waist the 135-storey tower, Doug Roberts, the architect played by Paul Newman, asks fire chief Mike O’Halloran – mummed by Steve McQueen – “Just how bad is it?” to which O’Halloran replies: “Depends how good your imagination is.” The answer is, of course, not terribly good at all – because it doesn’t need to be. The so-called “Master of Disaster”, producer Irwin Allen, ushered in the counterweight to all those Lycra-clad leapers with this 1974 film, whose release lagged not long behind the completion of the World Trade Center.

Corrupt developers and their senatorial shills mill around in the Promenade Room; their celebratory party has been abandoned and now they must fight to gain access to the scenic lifts scooting down the glassy flanks of the world’s tallest skyscraper. With blue-collar probity etched into every angle of his face, Chief O’Halloran sneers, “Architects!” To which smooth Doug Roberts can only rejoin, “Yeah, it’s all our fault.” Over the next three decades, and now in the new century, the bonfire of the vanities has never wanted for more fuel; the raising of one actual skyscraper is effectively twinned with the destruction of its cinematic doppelganger. Ballard’s 1981 novel Hello America features an expedition mounted from Europe in 2114 to visit the ecologically ravaged remains of the former superpower; and which rediscovers the skyscrapers of Manhattan sticking out – like the bones of a dinosaur – from 100ft-high sand dunes. But Ballard’s fervid skill in conjuring up the sensation of silica on silicate was about to be eclipsed; Hollywood imagineers have a rapacious appetite for displaying the deluging, flaming, death-raying, exploding and otherwise laying waste to the central business districts of American cities. The Towering Inferno is filmed with only closeups, mid- and long-shots; with the advent of CGI, it becomes possible – at least in theory – for disbelief to remain suspended high above the skyscrapers, an all-seeing eye that contemplates The Day After Tomorrow for its entire nauseating duration. But by creating the super-viewer – taller, faster and stronger than a collapsing skyscraper – the imagineers have simply reconfigured the problem at a different scale; now we are too big to experience our cities’ destruction feelingly, just as before we were too small to inhabit them empathetically. Lunch(ing) atop a Skyscraper, we were, each of us with his “baloney sub” in waxed paper and his soda bottle, part of a Renaissance group reclining on a girder, one that wouldn’t have been any more or less comfortable were that girder to have been lain on the ground in front of a half-built basilica. And surely, that was the entire point of what was intended to be a publicity shot for the RCA Building, a skyscraper completed in the same year King Kong was released.

If the Hollywood studio doesn’t mete out brimstone to go with the fire it rains down on the hubristic sinners of Babel, it’s only because Smell-O-Vision never caught on. It’s certainly not to do with any restraint on their part. Following the destruction of the Twin Towers by Al-Qaida-backed terrorists you might have expected some compunction about the vivid portrayal of skyscrapers being destroyed. Not a bit of it.

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Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photograph: WestEnd61/Rex Features

The willed destruction of the Twin Towers by religious fanatics steeped in Judaeo-Christian eschatology made this latent content so very manifest that the myth became a tale, the telling of which was effectively over. After 9/11, in a very important sense, the skyscraper simply ceased to exist. Just as my teenagers defend their first-person-shooting of virtualised Nazi zombies on the grounds that “They’re Nazis and they’re zombies”, so the zombie skyscrapers continue to stalk the globe, but their raison d’etre dispersed through the cloud of toxic dust that billowed out from Lower Manhattan throughout that endless and apocalyptic day.

How to show the storied skyline after 9/11 became a problem for the visualisers. The release in 2008 of James Marsh’s Man on Wire, a feature-length documentary about Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers was a cause not for the celebration of the indomitable human spirit but for a faux-reconnection with an earlier and more naïve age, one when it was possible for a gang of renegade circus artists to breach security without too much trouble, all in the cause of a spectacle whimsical rather than world-shattering. This was a stupendous feat of bravery and conquest; during the hour-long walk, throughout which he frolicked and struck attitudes, Petit himself became a real-life Superman, apprehending the skyscrapers directly through his own twanging form. He subsequently found himself unable to comment on the destruction of the WTO (which Marsh’s film also makes no mention of), but then the buildings that he had so romantically linked had ceased to exist, not simply now – but in 1974 as well. This is also why the presence in the opening sequence of The Sopranos of the Twin Towers, which are glimpsed over Tony Soprano’s shoulder as he exits the Holland Tunnel en route to his mafia fiefdom of North Jersey, seems quite so unheimlich: in the face of the painful verisimilitude of the drama series – which inaugurated a renaissance in American TV drama that endures to this day – it is the World Trade Center that confirms its true status as pure fiction. The same might be said of the opening sequence of Mad Men, another lavishly produced television drama series that, in the manner of Balzac’s Comédie humaine attempts to link together, through drama, the unravelling strands of American culture and society in the decades following the second world war.

This sequence uses spare graphics of the style employed by the “mad men” of the title (a self-ascription of cynically self-congratulatory Madison Avenue advertising executives of the 1950s and 60s) to show a white-shirted, dark-suited man plunging downwards in mute supplication – arms outstretched, legs akimbo – past the cubism of sparsely limned skyscrapers. Although strenuously denied by its creators, this forces on the informed viewer’s mind, quite unavoidably, the image of the so-called “jumpers”, those most benighted individuals, who, facing immolation in the fires raging after the hijacked planes smashed into the north and south towers, chose to fling themselves from the upper floors. In particular the Mad Men sequence recalls the most famous image of them: the “Falling Man” shot of a still-unidentified man plunging from the North Tower taken by the veteran AP photographer Richard Drew.

It is easy to see the jumpers as a confirmation of the submerged but still-dominant Tower-of-Babel mythos of the western skyscraper. In The Towering Inferno the adulterous businessman is immolated – the first death we witness on screen – as he tries futilely to find a way out of the conflagration for him and his lover; shortly after this, the woman taken in sin jumps from the skyscraper. That the Twin Towers were credible icons of transnational capital flows, only serves to complete the apotheosis. In the years since the violent opponents of usury (a prohibition contemporary Salafist jihadis share with medieval Christians) launched their attack on the Babel-that-was-Mammon, the skyscraper has struggled to maintain any salience at all.

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Islam’s holiest shrine, the Kaaba and The Abraj al-Bait Towers (Mecca Royal Hotel Clock Tower) in Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty

In 2008, on a two-day hike across the auto-plutocratic city-state of Dubai and into the Empty Quarter of Arabia, I marvelled at skyscraper after skyscraper, built by indentured labour, and each seemingly a more bowdlerised example of that inherently bowdlerising architectural style, postmodernism. Hypertrophied mansard roofs supported by gargantuan Corinthian columns; Pantagruelian porticos leaning out over six-lane expressways planted with begonias drenched in costly desalinated water – the spectacle Dubai presents is of a last-chance saloon at which all the formal decadences of the west have come home to die. And then there is the matter of scale: by elevating detailing more suited to a sports shoe or an SUV thousands of feet into the sky, the Dubai skyscrapers themselves apotheosise those first Chicagoan up-thrusts, whereby the belle epoque was blasted into inner-space. The new International Style is that of the desktop toy writ horribly large.

In London it isn’t only the Shard that instantiates in the skyscraper a tendency the architectural critic Owen Hatherley has noted: to elide icon and logo in a single structure. The nicknames for these vast promotional devices follow ineluctably: “the Quill”, “the Walkie-Talkie”, and “the Cheesegrater” have joined the Gherkin and the Shard itself in altering for the foreseeable future the skyline of the city. They are not alone: in the next 20 years, scores of skyscrapers are set to rise up from the London clay into the capital’s smoggy heavens. I live in north Lambeth, hard by the dark carceral star of the new US Embassy, and this quarter is set to become engorged by the concrete poured into it and surfeited with the side dishes of reinforcing bars. I accord this development – in terms of my own life at least – to be a great irony: having failed to up sticks and move somewhere exotic while I still had the necessary verve, I’ve awoken in middle age to find that Shanghai is my new neighbour. And while there may be desultory political coverage of these pharaonic undertakings the popular and collective apprehension of them is more or less nonexistent; apart, that is, from Private Eye’s squib. It was said of Tolkien that, while a devout Catholic himself, he laboured carefully to expunge the Judaeo-Christian worldview from The Lord of the Rings, putting in its place what he saw as an older and deeper moral eschatology. That may well be; and it may also be true that the Two Towers of Isengard and Barad-dur (the Dark Tower) were inspired by a pair of particularly ugly Victorian water towers close to his boyhood home in Birmingham, but this meticulous scholar of Anglo-Saxon – and wild fantasist – nonetheless managed to zero in on the popular cultural consciousness of the 21st century with uncanny prescience.

In June 2012, one in a whole series of Arab mega-structures was completed. Largely ignored in the west, these include the crazed bodkin of the Kingdom Centre in Riyadh, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. In the next two decades, even this uppermost peak is set to be over-topped by at least 10 more vast skyscrapers in the region; but the Abraj al-Baitin Mecca are undoubtedly the purest expression of the deep correspondence between the Shard and Isengard. A hulk of pseudo neoclassicism only 11 metres shorter than the Burj Khalifa, the Towers do indeed tower over the Masjid al-Haram and its meteoric core, the Ka’abah. Many of the 3,000 hotel rooms and suites are positioned so that their windows look down into the holy-of-holies, so encouraging devotion in their temporary tenants. But it is the giant clock set in the Mecca Royal Clock Tower forming Abraj al Bait’s summit that cements together those two seemingly disparate lookalikes, the Shard and Isengard.

Mohammed al-Arkubi, general manager of the hotel, is reported as saying that “Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time, this is the goal.” It’s a fruitless goal if he expects the inhabitants of Middle Earth – sorry, I mean the west – to pay any attention. We don’t so much as look upon our own tower of Isengard, whose designer’s stated aim was to create a skyscraper that disappeared vaporously into the surrounding atmosphere – and we know better than to even glance at the compound eye of Saruman that floats atop the Dark Tower of Barad-dur (sorry, I mean Abraj al Bait). And if you were to tell us that this skyscraping nemesis, like so many of the Arabian towers, had been built by the Saudi Binladin Group, why, we’d only shrug our shoulders and observe, why not? After all, it is the biggest construction company in the world.

• A version of this piece will appear in The Future of the Skyscraper, edited by Philip Nobel, part of the SOM Thinkers Series, to be published by Metropolis in May.