Skyscrapers--An Urban Type

"The skyscraper is clearly identifiable not only by virtue of its historical development and the specific approach to architecture it embodies, but also because it has an identity easily readable as an architecture type," writes architecture professor Mario Campi in the introduction to this volume. If that's as incomprehensible to you as it is to this reviewer, fear not--despite the semiotic gobbledy-gook of its introduction (not to mention its ridiculous subtitle), Skyscrapers may well be the most accessible book ever published on the topic. It's a veritable skyscraper hall of fame, with each of about 100 of the world's most famous skyscrapers accorded a two-page spread of a few black-and-white photos, plans, and thumbnail info on its architect(s), dimensions, structure, interior installations, façade, and "urban context."

It's all here, starting with the lady most popularly associated with the kick-off of the steel-skeletoned Skyscraper Century--Daniel Burnham's ever-elegant Flatiron Building at the confluence of Fifth Avenue and Broadway in New York City (1902)--and wrapping up with images of the models for such heady works in progress as an elliptical tower in Kuala Lumpur that looks like a giant incandescent shark fin rising up out of the landscape. In between, the book details the usual suspects (the Woolworth Building, the Empire State, Johnson Wax, 860/880 Lke Shore Drive Apartments, Lever House, the Transamerica Pyramid, the Sears Tower, the AT&T Building, and London's Canary Wharf Tower) and the unsung heroes (like New York's deco-era Barclay-Vesey Building, which pioneered the much-copied "ziggurat-style" stepped design to accommodate new laws to keep ever-taller buildings from blocking out natural light on the streets below) as well as the new contenders (Tokyo's Millennium Tower, Hong Kong's origami-like Bank of China) and the never-should-have-happened (Trump Tower, that tacky gold-plated temple to 1980s Gotham greed; or Kevin Roche's brutally ugly Knights of Columbus building in New Haven, Connecticut).

What's most interesting is how, after so many decades of huge upturned shoeboxes, so many of the new buildings--like Cesar Pelli's Nationsbank Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina--have their luminous high-tech envelopes wrapped around new versions of the more shapely forms of their deco grandparents.

All around, no startling new insights or stellar photography here but a great lightweight thumbnail "who's who" among our modern-day cathedrals of industry and a fun coffee-table flip-through too. --Timothy Murphy