viewed via Google Earth, the world increasingly looks like a Monopoly board where the buildings spring up ever faster and ever higher

The world of skyscrapers thrives on reason and emotion, desire and numbers. The heavenward surge of architecture worldwide is driven primarily by the forces of physics and the economy – and by those of psychology. With polemic intent, architect Hans Hollein once proposed a skyscraper in the shape of a phallus. Very tall buildings, he said, are built not only out of a need to maximize vertical usage of expensive plots, or on the grounds of technical feasibility, but also as a result of compulsive irrationality. As he sees it, these urban erections typify a society whose favourite game is Monopoly.

And indeed, viewed via Google Earth, the world increasingly looks like a Monopoly board where the buildings spring up ever faster and ever higher. In Dubai, for example, where the "Dubai Tower" is thrusting its way upwards. The "world's tallest building" is scheduled for completion in November 2008. A ridiculous level of secrecy surrounds details of its final height, but it is estimated at around 800 metres. Meaning that "Burj Dubai" will outstrip the current record holder, the Taipei Financial Center, by 300 metres.

The number of very high buildings is growing rapidly. In New York, the birthplace of the twentieth-century skyscraper, there are 140 buildings over 150 metres. In Hong Kong, where this type of architecture arrived very much later, there are already around 40 such structures. At an almost monthly rate – especially in Taiwan and China, Malaysia and Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, in Japan, Australia and Africa – building sites are opening like launch pads, with an upwards gaze. In Moscow, Norman Foster has been commissioned to crown "Moscow City" – a development for 100,000 people and 20 skyscrapers – with a 600-metre super-skyscraper evoking the "greatness of Russia."

The foolish equation of "tallness = greatness" is applied everywhere. In 2007, the "tallest inhabited building" will be in China – the Shanghai World Center. Shanghai is also to be home to the "Bionic Tower," 1,125 metres tall. And fantasy plans have been circulating for years for the "X-Seed" – a four-kilometre tall building on an artificial island that would accommodate a million people.


After the attack on the World Trade Center, obituaries for the skyscraper were penned around the world. Although its development since 1870 took place primarily in the USA, this type of architecture has also been known in Europe – as "residential towers of an ideal city" – since the seventeenth century. The towers erected as status symbols by wealthy clans in central Italy until the fifteenth century, which have left their mark on the skylines of Bologna and San Gimignano, could also be considered as precursors. There appears to be a building gene for tallness. It is no wonder, then, that the evolution of tall buildings was not brought to a halt on 11 September 2001. At the time when the Twin Towers imploded, plans already existed for newer, higher towers. It was only a question of time before the mourning was over and they could be realized.


Architectural theorist Martin Pawley is one of the most prominent advocates of skyscraper technology. In his article "Notes on the Psychology of Great Towers," he writes: "There is no longer any technological barrier to building high." But above all: "A third millennium 90-storey building […] will be able to operate at half the energy cost and twice the thermal efficiency of a 20th-century eight-storey office block." Sooner or later, Pawley claims, not just isolated buildings but entire high-rise cities will grow skywards. At least in places that possess what he calls "entrepreneurial spirit": "The new skyscraper is a miracle of power, technology and art. Why on earth does anyone oppose it?"Well, let us take for example Passau in eastern Bavaria. For some days now, the town has been playing the role of the Gallic village that resists the intruder – in this case, the world's enthusiasm for the art of very tall buildings. Since the erection of a modest high-rise building in Passau – just 38 metres tall, but nonetheless looming large and lumpy over the old town – a war has been being waged on newspaper letters pages against the developer and the municipal authorities. Here, one has a palpable sense of the kind of justified suspicion which in Germany has long been directed against metropolitan hyperbole, against the "cry for the skyscraper." In 1929, Bruno Taut spoke of the skyscraper as an "American suit" to which the "architectural uniqueness of our cities should not be sacrificed." Replace American with Asian, replace Germany with Europe, and the same still applies today.

In Vienna, where the opening up of Eastern Europe suddenly caused the city to see itself in competition with Prague and Budapest, a "skyscraper concept" was adopted, and this concept is now under attack. Paris plans to alleviate its accommodation shortage with "residential towers" far from the notorious banlieues, a plan greeted with loud disapproval. In Cologne, UNESCO has even become involved in combatting plans for new skyscrapers. In Munich, no buildings are permitted that would be higher than the Church of Our Lady: 99 metres. The people's uprising in Passau, then, can be observed in similar form in any number of European cities. On various scales (and scale is all that distinguishes tall buildings from less tall ones), this debate is to be found wherever the centuries-old model of the "European city" needs defending against the impositions of the vertical city.

But Europe, whose tallest office building (Frankfurt's Commerzbank Tower) measures 259 metres, must also ask itself whether it is wrongly missing out on the future of urban development – or whether it is rightly defending its architectural heritage. According to UN studies, by the year 2035 two thirds of the world's population will be living in constantly expanding cities that are dense even high above ground. But global times also mean global problems in town planning: if the world is moving closer together, then Europe will eventually be surrounded by a paling fence of super-skyscrapers. Even today, then – notwithstanding grotesque episodes as in Passau – one needs to ask if taller buildings could be an answer to the future.There is a clear answer to this question. But it is usually drowned out by the usual European brand of debate on skyscrapers, which is sadly all too black-and-white, with room only for "skyscraper fetishists" or "skyscraper opponents." The answer is: yes, Europe too must consider compacting cities vertically. Possibly in more depth than other continents. If only on ecological grounds, as perceptibly finite energy resources will soon abolish the mobility we now wrongly take for granted, and with it the familiar division between suburbia and inner city. The consequence is urban compaction. And this necessarily involves taller buildings: more complex buildings, more closely spaced and with better access, resulting – as Pawley points out – in a fraction of the energy costs required for low-rise and isolated buildings. Not to mention the madness in terms of energy efficiency represented by urban sprawl.

Skyscrapers, including residential ones, will come. Certainly not as 4,000-metre utopias, but at more pragmatic heights of 40, 50 or 60 metres. Depending on usage, city size and – above all – their impact on the existing city. Initial studies speaking in favour of this smaller European scale of tallness already exist. But what we lack in Passau and elsewhere is something once mentioned by Louis Sullivan, the "father of the skyscraper" (1856-1924): "Where architectural imagination is absent, the case is hopeless."

If Europe is to avoid becoming an old town museum island for the Asian world, at the same time as keeping alive the unusually rich architectural heritage of its cities, it must address the issue of building up. Steering clear of the ecological and economic absurdity of the super-skyscrapers. But with a sense of the vertical as a dimension to be inhabited.