New York’s Towers of Babel

New York’s Towers of Babel

The world is facing an Urban Century. The world’s population is collapsing into city centers as manufacturing and agriculture need fewer humans because technology replaces the human hand with machines. The world’s urban population has grown from 751 million in 1950 to 4.46 billion in 2021 and will grow to 6.68 billion by 2050.

While architects and designers want to define and control the future of our cities, the immediate reality of New York City, now, is a lesson in what may be our future. It’s response can be seen by the advent of The Tower the fabric of Manhattan.

Whether the $25 billion spent at Hudson Yards, or the dozen “Needle Towers” that have been built with another dozen planned or building to house a tiny number of very wealthy, profit has been the central design criterion.

It is easy to bash these rude responses that maximize the value of the extremely expensive land needed. Each of these singularities has its own slight perversity. The sight of ungainly, uncoordinated, bloated glass stalagmites reaching up to nothing but vainglory, facing nothing but each other, feels dystopian. In The Guardian, Hamilton Nolan called it an “ultra-capitalist … billionaire’s fantasy.” John Massengale has noted that Pencil Towers give New York City the finger.

There is not only an aesthetic revulsion to New York’s extreme use of height to make money, but also in the desire to control what will be unprecedented human change. Urban design and planning has exploded in the United States as a career choice. The number of people employed in those fields has nearly doubled in just a few years – from just over 20,000 people to almost 40,000.

Besides aesthetics and demographics, the changing climate means that putting less carbon in our atmosphere will mean less climate change in our future. Density of population uses less carbon. When humans face change, our instinct is to control it. We mobilize to defeat Hitler, we sequester and vaccinate to defeat COVID, and we educate and then legislate to face the urban imperative. How do we address the extreme height and disturbing proportions that invade our sense of the world, even in an Urban Century?

Like any commercially based building, and almost all privately built urban constructions are intended to turn a profit for the builder. 1,000 feet in height is now a baseline. So less land cost per square foot of building means that a slenderness ratio of 20:1 is fully understandable. The eyewash of “density” and the absurdity of complete elevator dependence and extreme cost were always part of the tower reality. But now, in the wake of both the pandemic and seemingly uncontrollable crime, less than 40% of Manhattan’s businesses are occupied.

Manhattan may be offering up a cautionary tale, beyond Urban Design, Architecture via Zoning, or even the aesthetics of profit. Before there was ever even a thought of a skyscraper, let alone a Needle Tower, humanity contemplated reaching beyond our grasp.

Moses is said to have written the book of Genesis in the Bible over 2,500 years ago. In it, a tower is described, not as a profitable use of construction, but as a central devotion of its builders to control the world around it, and manifest our humanity. That Tower of Babel is both symbol and metaphor, but its meaning in religion and mythology is, to me, due the power of human expression, not theology. As Moses said:

Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

In the same way carbon is simply the byproduct of our desire to control the world, towers are the product humans build to express and control and “make a name for ourselves” – now, and 2,500 years ago.

This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Cities and Living Trends. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our ArchDaily topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.