Issue #3: Detail

Amiens Cathedral

Amiens Cathedral

France Chârtres, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Section reconstruction

Chrysler Building in Manhattan-scape

Chrysler

Empire State Building

Blade Runner

Blade Runner Art

Blade Runner Art

Blade Runner Art

Issue #2: Culture

Certain themes will emerge. One of them is a constantly evolving set of oppositions in an ongoing "battle of the styles," as the early writers often called it. Simply put, these contests occur between things like engineering and architecture; the old world and the new; traditional forms versus function and experimentation; commerce and utility versus art and beauty, the rational mind versus the spirit; the machine versus humanity; size versus scale. Together they form a kind of collective anxiety, the American struggle with the space between the ideal and the actual...Americans don't clothe or house themselves with ease, as do the people of Sweden say, or the Ivory Coast. They struggle with culture self-consciously, like Jacob wrestling with the angel....Someday, Americans will find out who they are -- and be comfortable with it. Meanwhile, the by-products of this process are pretty interesting if we pay attention. It is their in-betweeness that is often most American.

- Skyscraper, Prologue: The Skyscraper Problem - A Question of Style, Roger Shepherd

Issue #1: Verticality

And the street and avenue facades are a disappointment. As in the case in so many high buildings, a soaring and carefully composed grandeur above disintegrates near the ground level. Great tower scale and pleasant street scale seem difficult to reconcile...Superficial and obvious, its generally merely satisfactory proportions, its rich materials cannot redeem its heavy-handed detail, its basic lack of that creative imagination that distinguishes the tower. To the thousands passing, it brings no lift, no "kick"-it is just another building to walk past-adequate perhaps, but humdrum.

- Talbot Faulkner Hamlin criticizing the Empire State Building's relationship to street