First, neutral air and now blind skyscrapers. Blind skyscrapers?
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The AIA Guide to New York City is the standard guide to the architecture of the five boroughs of New York City, first published in 1967, with the most recent, the fifth edition, published in 2010.
The 2010 AIA Guide describes Trump Tower, at 721–725 Fifth Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, in midtown, a few blocks from 52nd Street, as ‘flamboyant, exciting, and emblematic of the American Dream’.
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Trump Tower has a sixty-foot waterfall in the lobby. The public spaces are clad in pink marble. There is a Trump Bar, a Trump Cafe and a Trump Grill, or ‘Grille’, filled with mirrors (and which, according to Vanity Fair, ‘could be the worst restaurant in America’). President Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, lives there with their son, Barron. President Trump himself likes to spend as much time as possible in Trump Tower, away from the White House in Washington, and at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, his ‘winter White House’. Some New Yorkers like to refer to Trump Tower as ‘the Black House’. Residents of Trump Tower have included Steven Spielberg, Sophia Loren, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, the former president of Haiti, Prince Mutaib bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Bruce Willis, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Jackson – who converted a room in his apartment into a mirrored dance studio.
In order to build the Tower, in 1980 Mr Trump demolished the art-deco Bonwit Teller department store, having promised the limestone reliefs on the building’s facade to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which wanted them for its sculpture collection: rather than removing the reliefs, though, he had them destroyed. According to Kent Barwick, the then chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, it was the building of Trump Tower that established Trump’s reputation ‘as a bad guy’: ‘Afterwards, rightly or wrongly, there was a question of trust.’ Trump Tower has fifty-eight floors: Trump claims there are sixty-eight. The building is entirely clad in glass.
On 12 September 2018, Barbara Res, a former vice-president in charge of construction for the Trump Organization, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News in which she claimed that during the construction of Trump Tower, Mr Trump asked an architect to remove Braille from the elevators:
‘What’s this?’ Trump asked. ‘Braille,’ the architect replied. Trump told the architect to take it off, get rid of it. ‘We can’t,’ the architect said, ‘It’s the law.’ ‘Get rid of the (expletive) Braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,’ Trump yelled back, calling him weak.
Well. What can you say? Maybe there is a blind man living in Trump Tower. It’s certainly a blind skyscraper.
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According to the Oxford English Dictionary – which was a true skyscraper enterprise if ever there was one, compiled by the Scottish polymath lexicographer James Murray with the assistance of a team of researchers and volunteers, and a murderer locked up in Broadmoor, who would all send Murray instances of the usage of particular words, which Murray would then organise and arrange in a system of pigeonholes he had set up in a corrugated iron shed in the back garden of his house in Oxford, a house just around the corner from where I used to live, in fact and by the by, when I first started reading Auden, and a house which remained a landmark because the Post Office had agreed to erect a special postbox outside, since Murray sent and received so much mail as he worked on the dictionary for over thirty-five years, and the postbox was still there when I was there, though Murray of course was long gone, having died before the dictionary was completed, failing to see it to press – the great Oxford English Dictionary lists no fewer than six definitions for the word ‘skyscraper’.
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First there is the nautical meaning – ‘a triangular sky-sail’. Then there are a number of colloquial meanings: ‘a high-standing horse’, derived from the name of a horse that won the Epsom Derby in 1789; ‘a very tall man’ (‘I say, old sky-scraper, is it cold up there?’); ‘a rider on one of the high cycles formerly in use’; and a form of ‘exaggerated’ story. And then, finally, the meaning with which we are now most familiar: ‘a high building of many storeys, especially one of those characteristic of American cities’.
The earliest quoted citation for this usage – a high building characteristic of American cities – is from an article published in the American Architect and Building News on 30 June 1883. The article makes a passionate claim for squat, ugly public buildings to become tall, towering structures: ‘This form of sky-scraper gives that peculiar refined, independent, self-contained, daring, bold, heaven-reaching, erratic, piratic, Quixotic, American thought …’ Refined, independent, self-contained, daring, bold, heaven-reaching, erratic, piratic, Quixotic, the skyscraper ‘gives’ American thought, it embodies a certain kind of economic and social activity and it defines the American city landscape, a landscape that, of course, changed for ever on 11 September 2001, with the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which at the time of their completion were the tallest buildings in the world (1 World Trade Center was 1,368 feet, 2 World Trade Center was 1,362 feet).
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(Not long after the attacks of 11 September 2001, discussions began about what, if anything, to build in place of the Twin Towers. Proposals for a replacement building or buildings included a cultural centre, various kinds of memorials and even an underground Twin Towers, mirroring the originals. In the end, the decision was made to build another, even bigger skyscraper. Construction of this new building – to be called Freedom Tower – began in 2006. In 2009, it was officially renamed One World Trade Center. When finally completed in 2014, the building, though taller than the original Twin Towers, was by no means the tallest in the world: times had changed. The top five tallest buildings in the world are now all in what Miroslav Šašek might call the eastern hemisphere: in Dubai, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Seoul and Mecca. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai tops out at 2,722 feet. The height of One World Trade Center is 1,776 feet – recalling the year of the American Declaration of Independence. Some buildings are built as symbols, but all buildings are symbolic.)
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
(Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York)
It’s difficult to determine when the first American skyscraper was actually built: was the fourteen-storey sugarhouse on Duane Street near Broadway, constructed sometime around 1840, really a skyscraper? It had no elevator. Perhaps it was Burnham and Root’s Montauk Building in Chicago, completed in 1882? Elevators, but only ten storeys. In Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 (1996), Sarah Landau and Carl W. Condit explain that the skyscraper – which might include not only tall office buildings but also high-rise apartments and hotels, and, more recently, in our own time, entertainment complexes and casinos – is an ever-evolving idea of a building that designates neither a specific style nor size and which takes particular forms in particular places. Chinese skyscrapers probably represent the future of the form, but there is no doubt that in the twentieth century, in Auden’s age, the skyscraper was distinctively and recognisably American – indeed, in the words of the architectural historian Roberta Moudry, in The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (2005), it was ‘the signal architectural and spatial event of the modern American city’.
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On 18 January 1939, Auden and Isherwood caught the boat-train from Waterloo to Southampton, departing for New York on the SS Champlain the next morning. ‘Well,’ said Isherwood, ‘we’re off again.’ ‘Goody,’ said Auden. They arrived in New York after a stormy journey on 26 January. Isherwood, recalling their arrival, wrote of ‘the Red Indian island with its appalling towers […] You could feel it vibrating with the tension of the nervous New World, aggressively flaunting its rude steel nudity.’ (It was snowing: the city, he wrote, looked like a ‘wedding-cake’.) Writing to a friend back in England in September 1939, having moved into an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, at 1 Montague Terrace, with a view across the East River, Auden described ‘looking out over water at the towers of Manhattan. The skyscrapers with the exception of Radio City which is one of the architectural wonders of the world are ugly close to but lovely from a distance.’ (Auden’s skyscrapers in the poem are a reminder that, among other things, ‘September 1, 1939’ functions as a kind of postcard home. Look, I’m in New York!)
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(Years ago, I planned to go on an Auden pilgrimage, visiting the places Auden had lived, starting at his birthplace, 54 Bootham, York, and taking in the various schools, then Oxford, Berlin, London, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Fire Island and Ischia, ending up in Kirchstetten and the hotel where he died, the Altenburger Hof, No. 5, Walfischgasse, Vienna. My wife suggested instead that we should go on a package tour to Fuerteventura, which we did. I didn’t see a skyscraper until I visited New York in my late twenties. When I was young, London did not boast skyscrapers – now, of course, it boasts like everywhere – so in my youth my familiarity with skyscrapers was strictly limited to watching the opening credits of the TV series Kojak, and Taxi, and reruns of the films of Harold Lloyd on BBC2 at teatime, including Look Out Below, High and Dizzy and Safety Last!, in which the great silent-comedy star hangs from the hands of a large clock on the outside of a skyscraper, dangling above the traffic below, a star about to fall.)
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Auden’s skyscrapers, it is important to note, were not our own. Our skyscrapers are ludic, playful, transparent boxes which reflect the triumph of International Style modernism and self-referential postmodernism, with their vast curtain walls, blank spaces and ironic curves. Our skyscrapers, for better and for worse, are Trumpian. Auden’s skyscrapers were serious stone, brick and terracotta echt American monuments: the Flatiron Building, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, the Bankers Trust Company Building, the Woolworth Building. And, of course, the Empire State Building, which was just a five-minute walk from the Dizzy Club on West 52nd Street.
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Auden, as Edward Mendelson points out, can often be found in his early work writing at ‘high altitudes’. He can also be found late at night in upper rooms: the poem ‘August for the people’, for example, from Look, Stranger!, is written ‘From the narrow window of my fourth-floor room’, with the poet musing and smoking into the night; similarly with the poem ‘Now from my window-sill I watch the night’. At this early stage of his career, Auden believed in privileged perspectives, viewing the world through the eyes of the airman, the hawk, the mountaineer and the spy – those with an insight or an overview. His early verse undoubtedly has what one might call a superior aspect.
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But he spied the dangers of his superior vantage point almost from the moment he took it up, recognising the motive for high-flying as vanity and the usual result of lofty observation as casual indifference and solipsism. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he launched a spate of attacks on the idea of the artist’s garret. As early as 1932, in ‘I have a handsome profile’, he mocked attic pretensions:
I’ll hire a furnished attic
A room on the top floor
I’ll spend my mornings writing
A book that would cause a furore
About a world that has had its day.
And at the Poet’s Party in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, he ridiculed the artist’s arrogance:
How nice at first to watch the passers-by
Out of the upper window, and to say
‘How glad I am that though I have to die
Like all those cattle, I’m less base than they!’
He broadened and conceptualised his discontent with high altitudes and high-handed attitudes in a passage in his essay ‘Hic et Ille’ (1956), which reads very much like a repudiation of the hawk’s perspective:
From the height of 10,000 feet, the earth appears to the human eye as it appears to the eye of the camera; that is to say, all history is reduced to nature. This has the salutary effect of making historical evils, like national divisions and political hatreds, seem absurd. I look down from an airplane upon a stretch of land which is obviously continuous. That, across it, marked by a tiny ridge or river or even by no topographical sign whatever, there should run a frontier, and that the human beings living on one side should hate or refuse to trade with or be forbidden to visit those on the other side, is instantaneously revealed to me as ridiculous. Unfortunately, I cannot have this revelation without simultaneously having the illusion that there are no historical values either. From the same height I cannot distinguish between an outcrop of rock and a Gothic cathedral, or between a happy family playing in a backyard and a flock of sheep, so that I am unable to feel any difference between dropping a bomb upon one or the other.
The bigger the picture, the broader the perspective: the more you see, but the less you care.
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So, anyway, the point is, despite the view, skyscrapers might well be described as ‘blind’.