the sensual tactility of tall buildings

There's a nice line in M. Tafuri's essay “Architecture and Cities in the United States 1870-1910” concerning the relationship between land values and building costs:

“… whereas the simple parceling-up of surface lots is the product of an elementary operation of division, the arithmetical operation carried out in a skyscraper is multiplication - of rents, of incomes, of profits.”

That's a cheeky way of saying that the functionality and efficiency of high-end architecture can be measured by its ability to extract maximum dollars from clients. For skyscrapers, maximisation derives from tallness, as does the aesthetic, which states at its simplest that tall buildings can be tall. (Or lofty.) Never mind what Louis Sullivan might have said about ornament, or others about other lofty principles. That's what they would say, wouldn't they— a self-respecting practice has to be rationalised. Point is, once buildings started to go really up, they would all be doing it (making buildings tall, that is, not necessarily talking about it).

So where does sensual tactility come into it? The phrase seems almost arbitrary — a placeholder for some quality which purports to take architecture beyond the mere functional and efficient into something other, some artistic other perhaps, dependent on our own beholder's eye. Fortunately for us, whatever that is is hard to define, which is why you can bet that someone's sterility will be someone else's sense of the pure, and one's lack of ornament another's enthralling minimalism. We'll take a stab at it though, and call it something as simple as shape. Buildings have always had a sense of that. Nothing shapelier than an unadorned cube. Unless an unadorned pyramid. Unless a sphinx.

Or unless an iron tower. Not particularly considered non-rigid or non-sterile when built for 1889, Gustave Eiffel's structure was at least world-wise the tallest. Paris-wise it still is. Do the French know something? Maybe that icons mean money. (As a wind-resistor it's proven functional, as a tourist-attraction it's proven more than efficient.)

Like almost all large buildings, the Eiffel Tower was a commissioned project. Few before had built their own personal mega-buildings, as fewer have since. (The Pharaoh subcontracted his to de Mille.) Vastness is beyond the scope of DIY. Apart from having to adhere to a few basic principles, such as the stability of large masses (forget Euclid — now passé since faster chips), high-end architecture, according to Tafuri's observation, obeys a simple law which hasn't much changed over time. It's to service the basic needs of a wealthy elite (star clients: Khufu aka Cheops, the Pope, the Guggenheim; star example: ET above (of which TV might say, “this tower is brought to you by: the city of Paris, Citroen, and the glorious spirit of France”)). And if it's a nice irony that sometimes the elite's basic need is to serve our basic needs, such being a common synergy of needs (think flower to insects, with us the pollinators), then it's a case of we who pay to they, for our spot in the housing estate, the factory, or around the water cooler in the office tower (which by the way has been known to melt — in which case take care not to take the elevator). So then this question: is it the factory, you're thinking, which is the functional and efficient one, or the tower? Well, for old rigidness there was the Great Pyramid of Giza. For old sensuous tactility there was the Great Mummy inside. What is your pleasure, commissar, brick walls, strip windows, corrugated roofing? Or yours, O master, titanium cladding, stained glass, post-modern retro-tops?

Coming to my point, at some point a commercial imperative becomes less important than a prestige one. So the efficiency of a building may well fail Tafuri's law of floorspace dollarability and still be commercially canny. That's where the pos modern kicks in (point of sale, I mean). The elite patron (actually, obscenely rich elite patron) may be swayed by a cultural perception if it prevails strongly. Particularly if that perception is one which links the aesthetic of a building to its commercial value. Elite architecture is now an elite art (thank you, theory), just as elite art is a world-wide currency (thank you, Christies). Dollar values continue to go up, as do building heights. Even the cladding (titanium yet) gets more expensive. At least for art buildings. (And it's hardly witty of the art building to be so titaniumly warped — unless we're talking style cliche; for wouldn't it be more conceptually ironic if shaped like a Sullivan box, considering there's bound to be minimalist boxes inside — or is that getting too silly?). Anyway, to think of the modern elite building in terms of Tafuri's dictum, we might say that it is part of a wealth culture. And this is a perception helped along by theory, ever since theory has become feral in the world. Which it big-time has, since — when? Let's say since the late nineteenth century — since impressionism, the popular press, the liberal education of the masses, etc and all that. Since rich became a ridiculously insufficient word to describe what goes for real in the world. Since Louis Sullivan waxed on about ornament.