Because not many B-P's subscribe to H-Urban, I cross-post the following from
Sharon Irish (who has studied Cass Gilbert).  It's part of a long,
impenetrable thread about skyscraperism (yawn), but her quotation of his
remarks about why Mussolini should not build a skyscraper in Rome are, to me,
extremely interesting.

Best to all,  Christopher

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<<<Posted by Sharon Irish <[log in to unmask]>

Diana Agrest's "Architectural Anagrams: The Symbolic Performance of
Skyscrapers" (_Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a
Critical Practice_ Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991): pp. 103-105, ends
with a section that, in the aftermath of September 11,  reminds me of
Arthur C. Clarke's _Childhood's End_ and relates to the Kunstler and
Salingaros piece, "The End of Tall Buildings." She wrote:

          "If at first the termination [meaning the top] of the
skyscraper was necessary in order to transform the metaphor of
"touching the clouds" into an apparent reality, in an age when this
"touching" is literally possible by means of satellites and space
voyages such symbolization is no longer required. Instead it is
necessary to remember that it is from earth that space is approached
and earth remains on center. The space between buildings, as it
occurs in the World Trade Center, may be read as a metaphor for the
"race" to outer space. Where the skyscraper used to race upward
seeking its limit, this limit can now no longer be thought of in the
same way. The opening itself between the buildings themselves appears
as the signifier. The World Trade Center is only "detailed" for the
level in which it emerges from the ground. The buildings could be cut
off at any point.
          "There is, however, a unique skyscraper, one which is "the
biggest one in the world--four times the volume of the Empire State
Building," according to the official guide. This is a structure for
the assembly of an object that will materialize its own metaphor; it
is the Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy whose lateral facade recalls
the silhouette of the Empire State Building and whose double doors
anticipate the World Trade Center. Here the skyscraper has unfolded
and the metaphor of the skyscraper is realized in a building which as
pure structure contains the "spire" that will literally reach to the
sky. Here technology has been transformed by metonymy into pure
symbol. The skyscraper is now a door, a door both to space and to the
city, to the plurality of meaning."

Further thoughts on the Kunstler and Salingaros piece:

Megalomania is hardly limited to architecture. Nor were skyscrapers
only the product of modernist thinking. Cass Gilbert, designer of the
Woolworth Building (1910-13), for 17 years the tallest building in
the world, was hardly a modernist. His words of caution written to
Mussolini in 1924 are a telling damnation of his own fascination with
skyscrapers: "I recall that during the time I was building the
Woolworth Tower I visited Europe, as I frequently do, and that I was
distressed to find that the new scale of height which I had in my
mind dwarfed everything else I looked at so that the great towers and
domes which had seemed to me so lofty and so fine before, now lost
some measure of their majestic height and that I was thereby robbed
of much of the pleasure that I had in them before."

To discourage Mussolini from building a skyscraper in Rome, Gilbert
continued:

"If then a tower 1100 feet high should be erected in Rome, a great
and glorious thing as it might be itself, it would inevitably be
detrimental to the city from an aesthetic point of view....It is well
that we preserve our respect for the great ancients...and it is not
fitting that we should attempt to outstrip them merely because we
have the mechanical means now at hand."

This letter from Cass Gilbert to Benito Mussolini, October 16, 1924,
is in the Cass Gilbert Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

I would also recommend a reading of Dolores Hayden's "Skyscraper
Seduction Skyscraper Rape" in _Heresies_ (May 1977).

Sharon Irish, Ph.D.
Research Scholar
School of Architecture
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign>>>
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