“All we’ve done in the 20 years since is build even taller.”
“There were all sorts of symposiums and public statements that we’re never going to build tall again,” one former architect told The Guardian in 2021. Tall buildings that were in the works got scaled down or canceled on the assumption that soaring towers were too risky to be built or occupied. After 9/11, experts concluded that skyscrapers were finished. We’re living through the birth of a new species of skyscraper that not even architects and engineers saw coming. It was so tall, so thin, I began to doubt that the cross-hatching of metal beams could actually be a building. It rose above the brick building, then over the windows of neighboring apartments, walling off precious blue behind it.
It couldn’t possibly get much taller.īut the skeleton kept stretching. When the metal skeleton of a skyscraper materialized beneath the crane, I told myself that the new building would top out soon. I consoled myself about the crane with the flimsy logic I once used after discovering a bedbug: It’ll go away! Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
