The impossibility of skyscrapers.

I just can’t imagine it — that a hundred years ago, the modern American city surged towards the sky with such assurance and grace, without the whole lot of it come tumbling down, tumbling down. Structural engineers understood the secrets of the towers: another 20 stories of glass and steel was just a day’s work on a decent slide rule…

Vertical cities are not only modernist symbols of wealth and power — they make a different kind of being possible (with benefits and downsides both).

From a chat yesterday: I’m wondering by analogy to what equally impossible-seeming possibilities-for-being our nascent structural understanding of social networks will lead. Stretching the analogy: maybe the peripheral awareness that FaceBook gifts us of the ‘relevant’ events and activities of the more distant of our personal cloud of contacts[1] is, in the scale of things to come, somewhere around the sophistication of a wobbly Elizabethan wooden 3 storey townhouse, leaning in over the street. Imagine augmented sociality four hundred years hence. Here we are — building businesses on science fiction, with rude, home-cobbled tools. But there’s the (dimly conceivable) possibility that the inheritors of our primitive craft will be the structural engineers of new social forms as transformative — and emblematic — as were the vertical architectural forms of Early Modern Manhattan.

To be continued…