General & Miscellaneous Architectural History & Criticism, International Style & Modernism - Architecture, Skyscrapers

Skyscraper : Vertical Now

Name: Skyscraper : Vertical Now
Author: Eric Howeler
ISBN: 9780789310057

by Eric Howeler

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Overview

No building type captures the imagination as powerfully as the skyscraper. Since its unveiling in New York and Chicago over 100 years ago, the skyscraper has transformed the skyline of every major city from L.A. to Shanghai, Sao Paulo to San Francisco, and London to Kuala Lumpur. Eric Howeler has collected and organized over seventy skyscraper designs from the world's leading architects. The author's penetrating essays on the cultural, technological, and social factors governing skyscraper design serve as general introductions to thematic groupings of the best contemporary skyscrapers from the last decade. Driven by escalating demands for real estate, the skyscraper has metamorphosed into a highly specific structure that pushes the limits of technology, precipitating a parade of architectural styles. The skyscraper of today is no longer exclusively a North American phenomenon -- the Asian skyscraper has, in some ways, outdone its predecessor -- but promises to reinvent itself as it influences and is influenced by an international landscape.

As urban populations climb, the skyscraper offers the antidote to the questions that plague a city's future. Architects and city planners champion the skyscraper as a key player in the management of high-density urban centers, giving rise to a series of so called "green skyscrapers" that attempt to achieve balances between the organic and inorganic components of a building site. The skyscraper as an icon, monument, urban instrument, and workplace continues to emerge as a powerful site and symbol for collective aspirations and imaginings. This richly illustrated volume (over 200 color photographs) explores skyscraper designs of the recent past and near future, and examines how this dominant structure shapes our existence.