Can you hear the rattle of the skyscraper? It’s the sound of the free cotton candy cart passing past rows of empty desks, and the lonely dripping of the beer keg tap near the water fountain. In a desperate attempt to lure employees into their offices, companies are rolling out all kinds of goodies, from monogrammed water bottles to personalized notebooks. Hopefully, these perks might convince people to leave home, get on crowded trains, and scramble for elevators, all in the name of teamwork and productivity. But will anyone want to work in a tightly closed high-rise building again, breathing the same air as thousands of other potentially infectious people?

As millions of people around the world have settled down to work from home, it’s hard to imagine the office tower being a viable proposition again. Planning requests for high-rise buildings in London fell by a third last year, while New London Architecture’s high-rise survey in 2021 found work had only started on 24 buildings of 20 floors or more, a decrease of almost half compared to 44 in 2019. At the age of piling up people in large glass pits, cities competing for more and more arrows high, finally come to an end?

If past crises are something to do, probably not. The story of the skyscraper is a story of people predicting its end. The Empire State Building was doomed as a business disaster when it opened in 1931, seen as an act of extreme pride that surely would never be repeated. As Carol Willis writes in Form Follows Finance, A History of Skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, the project was “the most colossal miscalculation of the 1920s.” It was completed in the depths of the Great Depression and remained mostly vacant for a decade, earning it the nickname the Empty State Building. It did not begin to generate profits until 1950. But when the markets recovered, new growths emerged. Willis describes skyscrapers as “weeds”; if the economic conditions are good, they will grow. Indeed, the following century saw a boom in the sky.

But skepticism often returned. The next big prediction of the end of the skyscraper came in the 1970s, with the advent of “telecommuting”. American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler was one of the first to question the skyscraper, predicting that advancements in communications technology would leave office towers empty as work shifted to a new generation of “Electronic chalets”. In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, he envisioned “a return to the cottage industry on an electronic basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the center of society”. His words are strangely similar to today’s talk of a great urban exodus – and are as likely to come true as the predictions in a 1974 Economist article: said “living on an island in the Pacific.” Instead, the 1980s saw another boom in tower building, as banks rivaled increasingly swaggering silhouettes and Margaret Thatcher’s deregulatory ‘big bang’ spawned Canary Wharf.

All the while, there was a feeling that skyscrapers had an insidious effect on the human psyche. Architecture critic Peter Blake called for a moratorium on tall buildings in his 1977 book, Form Follows Fiasco, which denounced the “various kinds of inner trauma” inflicted on those forced to live or work in towers. Respected urban theorist Christopher Alexander agreed. In his influential volume, A Pattern Language, published the same year, he wrote: “There is a lot of evidence to show that tall buildings drive people crazy.

Skyscrapers weren’t gone, but such “new town planner” thinking accelerated the parallel growth of the out-of-town office campus, where low-rise buildings were arranged among ponds and verges. carefully mowed – echoing the desire to live and work as close as possible to nature. As Louise Mozingo shows in Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes, at the turn of the 20th century there was more office space in American suburbs than in its central cities. Greenery, she wrote, was associated with kindness, and these business parks appropriated the aesthetics and moral code of the suburbs. Like the proud suburban homeowner of his lawn, companies have used the bucolic landscape’s ability to communicate identity, status, and righteousness, as a foil to grime, crime, and faceless glass towers. collected from the city center.

Then came an unprecedented event that would surely be the last nail in the coffin of high construction. After the September 11 attacks, which left us with indelible images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers, how could we ever feel safe in a skyscraper again? Skyscrapers had become the targets of an unpredictable world war, vulnerable at all times. “We are convinced that the era of skyscrapers is over,” wrote James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere, a few days after the attacks. “It must now be considered as a typology of experimental building that has failed.

Twenty years later, the data points to the exact opposite. More than five times more skyscrapers have been built since 9/11 than there were before, according to a study by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. And they got even taller: 86 of the 100 tallest buildings in the world have exploded since 2001.

So, will the pandemic, combined with a growing awareness of the environmental impact of glass towers, finally spell the end? The Chinese government’s 2020 edict against supertalls (which bans buildings over 500 meters and requires additional verification of those over 350 meters) has already had an effect. Combined with the impact of Covid, it has resulted in a 20% drop in skyscraper construction around the world.

But a chorus of urban theorists argue that it will ultimately be impossible for the human species to resist the lure of density. In their new book, Survival of the City, Harvard economics professors Ed Glaeser and David Cutler write that “the ability of cities to enable the joys of human interactions and shared experiences may be their greatest protection against the exodus. urban ”. They cite numerous studies that show people are more satisfied with in-person meetings than with exclusively online communication, as well as research that suggests even solitary deep thinking can benefit from the presence of other humans. A study showed that chess players forced to play online by the pandemic made worse moves than the same players when playing in person.

Another topical book takes on a more sinister tone. Exploring the history and future of quarantine in Until Proven Safe, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley predict a world of smart buildings that will allow normal life to continue, but only through continuous monitoring and evaluation powered by the AI ​​of their occupants. “In the coming 40s,” they write, “you can go anywhere – but you will be monitored, measured and diagnosed all the time. The skyscrapers will be back; and, from now on, they will be watching you.

Further reading:

The form tracks finances by Carol Willis, Princeton Architectural Press, £ 26.77

City survival by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, Hodder & Stoughton, £ 20

Until safety is proven by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, Pan Macmillan, £ 25