Towers for Tomorrow - Art Institute of Chicago's travelling exhibit on skyscrapers - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 2001 by Franz Schulze

Local climates and social mores assert their influence as the epic competition for the world's tallest skyscraper continues into the 21st century. A traveling show examines the future of the definitive building type of the modern--and postmodern--city.

The two cities most involved in the birth and development of the skyscraper are New York and Chicago, where, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fullest exploitation was made of the technological possibilities immanent in the invention of the elevator and the replacement of bearing-wall construction by the metal frame. And since Chicago has contributed more to the history of architecture than to the record of any other art, it makes good sense that a significant new exhibition, "Skyscrapers: The New Millennium," has been organized by the department of architecture of the Art Institute of Chicago and is now traveling nationally.

To be sure, the tall building has long since become a fixture in all the larger cities of the United States, and indeed it is no longer the strictly American accomplishment it was until World War II. Vast amounts of publicity have attended Cesar Pelli's 1,483-foot-high Petronas Towers (1998) in Kuala Lumpur, most notably their accession to the status of tallest building(s) in the world, a superlative earlier and steadily associated with structures in New York and Chicago. The Art Institute's show goes well beyond such an acknowledgment, extending its coverage to high-rises erected or planned in no fewer than 30 cities in 22 countries on four continents around the globe. The skyscraper is now an international phenomenon, having achieved that standing in a remarkably short time--hence the title of the exhibition, which deals mostly with buildings of the 1990s and the first year of the new century.

While the esthetic quality of the works was the prime criterion for their inclusion in the show, substantial consideration was also given to a variety of other factors, especially the condition of regional economies worldwide. In the U.S., the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s arrested high-rise construction throughout the country. As a consequence, the Miglin-Beitler Tower (another project by Cesar Pelli), meant, at 1,999 feet, to capture the title of "world's tallest building" for Chicago, never got off the drawing board. The economic downturn prompted a number of American architects to open offices abroad, with the result that Frankfurt profited from buildings by Chicago's Helmut Jahn (the Messe Tower, 1991) and New York's Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (the DG Bank, 1993). Shortly thereafter, in the early 1990s, the Asian economies swung upward, a development dramatically evidenced in the exhibition by 10 building proposals for Shanghai--the largest number devoted to any city. This last statistic, however, requires clarification: only two of those high-rises had been completed by the end of 2000. During the past several years, the economic sun clouded over greatly in Asia, and what has been planned is not necessarily what the world will finally see.

At the same time, parameters other than economics have been brought to bear on the latest skyscrapers. Architects adept at new technologies have embraced ecological motives, leading to the design of buildings intended to conserve energy through such features as operable airflow windows and heat recovery devices, nighttime heat purging systems, low-energy air and water circulation mechanisms, highly efficient zoned air-conditioning and improved forms of building maintenance. Several of the more memorable examples of such "green" skyscrapers are worth citing. Designed by Fox & Fowle Architects, the Conde Nast Building at Four Times Square in New York (1999) is marked by energy-creating photovoltaic cells and a waste-water system that cools the offices while minimizing the use of fossil fuels. At the same time, Menara UMNO (1998), an office building in Pulau Pinang, Malaysia, demonstrates some of the ways in which environmentally sensitive architecture may vary according to locale. Since Malaysia's climate is humid, most tall buildings there are cooled by electrical air-conditioning. In Menara UMNO, however, the customary equipment is combined with natural ventilation whenever suitable, and employees' desks are situated no more than 20 feet from an operable window, thus assuring all occupants the benefit of natural air and light. In the Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt, completed in 1997 after the designs of Foster and Partners of London, motorized double-glazed windows provide the circulation of outdoor air when offices are warm. Moreover, nine landscaped gardens, planted at varying levels within the 60-story structure, create a cunning combination of inside and outside settings that has produced--in a commercial metropolitan skyscraper, no less--the welcome if distinctly uncommon effect of a village green.

Some advances in technology have less to do with environmental ends or local economies than with the assembly and function of the buildings themselves. Experiments are under way that alter both traditional construction methods and standard devices for moving occupants within a structure's interior. The Shimizu Construction Company in Japan has devised a system of robotics in which welding, riveting and beam placement are carried out by a few computer operators rather than by gangs of construction workers. The obvious objective is cost efficiency, an important issue in Japan, where labor is not cheap. Meanwhile, the Otis Elevator Company in the U.S. is putting together a system that enables a cab to move both vertically and horizontally, so that more than one can occupy an elevator shaft at the same time.