The new apartment blocks that housed the bourgeoisie of Vienna and Paris after 1870 were of the same architectural species. Four or five floors high, they extended in solid, never-ending rows along the avenues and boulevards. In the walkup city, the first floor above ground-floor shops was the prime location—the piano nobile for Italian town houses and palazzos, the bel étage in French apartments. Inverting the modern association of height and hierarchy, the top floor was despised for its cold and inconvenience, not valued for nice views, relegated to servants and starving artists.
The evolution of skyscrapers and a skyscraper aesthetic from this very different starting point is a story told time and again. From the 1890s to the 1930s the vertical gradually conquered the horizontal. The Metropolitan Life Building of 1909 was still a solid block with a now more substantial tower. The Woolworth Building, which took away the title of world’s largest building in 1913, shifted the relative importance of base and tower. The big three that followed—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the RCA Building—drew all their appeal from the vertical. In the nineteenth century, “skyline” had meant the natural horizon of country vistas. Only in the 1890s did writers commonly apply it to the horizon line of downtown buildings (the first such citation in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from George Bernard Shaw in 1896).
The high tower has endured as the symbol of modernity and urban importance. If New York and Chicago had skyscrapers, dozens of smaller cities wanted them too. Nebraska and North Dakota completed high-rise state capitols in the early 1930s. Los Angeles (1928) and Buffalo (1931) built high-rise city halls. Before the Great Depression hit, the Baltimore Trust Building reached thirty-four stories, Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning reached forty, and the American Insurance Union tower in Columbus, Ohio, reached forty-six. “Des Moines is ever going forward,” reported one of its newspapers. “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the state like a lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
It was an easy step from Des Moines to Zenith, the fictional amalgam of Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Kansas City where Sinclair Lewis placed thoroughly modern real estate salesman George F. Babbitt in his 1922 novel. As the novel opens and Babbitt has yet to stir in his new Dutch colonial house in the new upscale suburb of Floral Heights, “the towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.” As Babbitt tells the Zenith Real Estate Board, their city is distinguished by “the Second National Tower, the second highest business building in any inland city in the entire country. When I add that we have an unparalleled number of miles of paved streets, bathrooms, vacuum cleaners, and all the other signs of civilization … then I give but a hint of the all round unlimited greatness of Zenith!”
With the aspiring constructions of Des Moines, Cleveland, and Zenith in the background, the last century has seen an imaginative three-way interaction between real buildings that have reached taller and taller, grandiose proposals from the drawing boards of ego-rich architects, and often beautifully rendered cityscapes from the easels of visionary (or hallucinatory) artists.
In the 1920s Le Corbusier—one of most self-confident of the design utopians who shaped twentieth-century ideas about cities—created a series of schemes for high-rise cities: a diorama and drawings for a “City for Three Millions” in 1922, the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) in 1924, and in 1925 the Voisin Plan for central Paris, which would have carried modernity to a shocking logical extreme. Artists struggled to stay ahead of the curve when technological capacity grew and architects could let their minds out-roam the practical and politics (not even Baron Haussmann could have done that to Paris).
Meticulously constructed and articulated, the miniaturized city used for shooting the background for the 1930 film Just Imagine had a counterpart at the end of the decade at the New York World’s Fair, where General Motors exhibited a scale model of a freeway-and-suburb metropolis of the future. Courtesy Fox/Photofest © Fox.
Artists struggled to stay ahead of the curve. The most prominent in the United States was New Yorker Hugh Ferriss, who staged a “Drawings of the Future City” exhibit in 1925 and followed with drawings for “Titan City,” or New York from 1926 to 2026, exhibited at Wanamaker’s department store. His drawings celebrated technological progress with ziggurat towers and sweeping searchlights illuminating urban canyons. The images can seem dark and foreboding, but General Electric and Goodyear advertisements adopted the same imagery, as did the miniaturized “Gotham” set for Just Imagine.
Rockefeller Center is a close steel and stone relative.8 The Ferriss vision was echoed in the sets and backdrops for the silent movie classic Metropolis (1927), inspired by director Fritz Lang’s first visit to New York, and anticipated the style of Batman’s Gotham City.9
The backdrops for Fritz Lang’s seminal film Metropolis reference thirty years of visionary depictions of New York and similar cities. Realistic skyscrapers rise next to fantasy architecture that recalls Pieter Brueghel’s 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel, while traffic speeds across precarious elevated highways and railways and aircraft dodge through the concrete canyons. Courtesy UPA/Photofest © UFA.
Dial forward to 1956, when Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high skyscraper (“The Illinois”)—four times the height of the Empire State Building. It would have climbed 528 stories, with fifteen thousand parking stalls and 150 helicopter parking slots. A half-century later, the world was catching up to both Wright and Bruce Sterling with stand-alone super-skyscrapers in Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and most recently Dubai, where the Burj Khalifa soars more than a half mile high. Critic Witold Rybczynski draws direct parallels in engineering and design from “The Illinois” to the Burj Khalifa: use of reinforced concrete, a tapering silhouette, a tripod design, and “a treelike central core that rises the full height of the building to become a spire”—all in all a sort of stalagmite form to bring a touch of fantasy to the common corporate glass-and-metal box.10
This poster for Metropolis stresses the eerie and the fantastic, with the machine-human version of the heroine Maria backed by an abstracted skyline framed by the beams of searchlights. Courtesy UPA/Photofest © UFA.
This poster for the French release of Metropolis highlights the gigantic scale of the emerging megacity, multiplying the sort of step-back skyscrapers that filled Manhattan after the city’s 1916 zoning ordinance. Courtesy UFA/Photofest © UFA.
In the real estate business, hype and high-rise go together: there are the real buildings we have just mentioned, ambitious but serious designs that don’t quite get off the ground, and exuberant entries into design competitions by big names like Paul Rudolph, Paolo Soleri, and Rem Koolhaus that are little more than thought experiments in the style of architectural science fantasy. From there, it’s an easy segue to artistic renditions of future cities. The difference: without needing even a cursory bow to engineering realities and financial possibilities, visual artists can assemble a thousand Burj-Khalifas into a single super-metropolis.
I examined two websites that have assembled future city art: One offers “45 incredible futuristic scifi 3D city illustrations” and the other “100 imaginative cities of the future artworks.”11 By my eyeball categorization, 106 of the images are vertical cities that rise to wild and giddy heights, compared to only 14 low-rise cities that stretch to distance horizons, 9 floating, hanging, or orbiting cities untethered from a planetary