How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness...

Sullivan, Louis H. The tall office building artistically considered. Lippincott's Magazine, 

March 1896. 

Sullivan on the tall office building. Many 19th century writers reflect something about this sentiment,because the tall building was a new thing. Today, people do not recognize that the tall building is not desirable. Perhaps people today don't mind the tall building. Maybe some even like it.

Therefore, the "problem of the tall building" seems to have fallen asleep with time: it is not brought up as an issue for much of today's architecture conversations. The focus on facade technologies, parametric computations, green building considerations, so on and so forth, have taken the focus away from the subject. But, in my opinion, the subject is not dead. Tall buildings are still sterile piles, crude, harsh agglomerations, stark staring exclamations of eternal strife, just that the people of this age have become (have become, or are born in an age) desensitized to that.