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