Skyscraper : the vernacular of capitalism

Abstract

When, in fourth year design lab, I was asked to design a fifty-story multi-use tower in the centre of an urban area I wasn't sure whether to be excited or nauseated. The thrill of building the ultimate building form competed with a fear of such an alien invasion on my site. The form's vertical limitation provided a resourceful design challenge to work upon, while a big pile of periodicals marked with little yellow papers provided insights on how these monsters functioned and looked. The result, to date, provided immense personal satisfaction. Somehow, though, at the final design review, I felt that my design process lacked a genesis, or better still, I was not sure what exactly I had assembled. The model was beautiful, but the building seemed lo be too powerful, its aesthetic too egocentric, its raison d'etre too flimsy. Soon, I came to realise that the cause of these insecurities was not the design itself but rather the alien of whom I was so scared of in the beginning of the assignment. Even though a thorough research involving case studies had been carried out, I felt that there was still too much about this 'skyscraper' building with which I was not conversant. I was not confident about its historical metamorphosis, its various meanings and realities, its hidden virtues and vices: there was scope for a better understanding, especially due to the fact that shadows of its existence were starting to appear on the Maltese Islands. I do not, in fact, intend carrying out a formal analysis of the skyscraper, and neither reliving its history. My intent is actually that to use the skyscraper as a strong magnifying glass with which to observe the society that builds it and that lives in the spaces itself creates. Just as much as the skyscraper has been used through its history to extrapolate

and instil meanings, likewise I intend using it to examine issues such as globalisation and varying values of contemporary culture. In various ways, as the dissertation will show, the skyscraper perfectly lends itself to this task.