THE VERTICAL CITY: APPROACHES TO THE SKYSCRAPER CITY AS PHENOMENOLOGICAL SPACE AND SEMANTIC FIELD

The article is a kind of “project essay” or “brain storm” concerning skyscraper cities. It proposes different approaches for the study of this subject. Starting with the observation that in Danish traditional houses are lying (ligger), whereas skyscrapers are “standing” (står), different phenomenological and discursive perspectives for the study are sketched. The article also suggests that the analysis of contemporary skyscraper cities can shed new light on more traditional cities in the same way as new media illuminate the characterics of old media.


INTRODUCTION
The following article is about a work in progress and can be regarded as a kind of "project-essay" sketching some analytical approaches to the skyscraper city. The aim of my project is to produce new knowledge about the vertical city primarily in a phenomenological as well as a discursive perspective. 1 To this end, a conceptual effort is needed in order to qualify the international and Danish debate on skyscrapers and high-rises by developing more precise and sensitive analytic tools that can enhance the capability of observation. Taking into account that Denmark has no noticeable tradition for very high buildings, the city analyses will mostly deal with selected skyscraper cities or high-rise concentrations in other parts of the world. Surprisingly, the vertical city has only to a limited extent been subject for appropriate analysis-it is amazing considering the fact that in many ways, it is the epitome of late modernity. This is the reason for the rather broad formulation of the project. But I would also claim that a general survey of the skyscraper city can contribute to the understanding of previous city formations in the same way as new media have proven capable of shedding new light on previous media forms.
In the existing literature, skyscrapers are predominantly discussed historically and as individual architectural works. Even though you can argue that the isolated skyscraper aspires to an almost urban scale, it is not single skyscrapers that are the focus for my survey, but the city they are part of and to the creation of which they contribute. It is part of the project's objective to The project includes a number of prior assumptions and preliminary theses about the ways we experience the vertical city and its semantic potential. In this context, I can only present some of them in a rather generalised form and without going into a more detailed discussion with the literature.

BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH FIELD
The skyscraper is a product of the late nineteenth century, made possible by newly developed iron and later steel constructions that released the walls from supporting functions and by the invention of the lift that shifted the building's vertical hierarchy and pushed the "piano nobile" or "bel étage" upwards towards the sky. In the twentieth century skyscrapers sprouted up proclaiming technical enthusiasm and drive for progress. The building type was the significant contribution of the USA to architectural history, and the skyline of skyscraper cities worldwide visualised the aspirations of financially powerful centres to emulate and even challenge American hegemony. Before the new millennium, the supremacy of the United States was broken as the baton was passed to the East in a general "translatio imperii." Supported by new construction principles that make more sculptural forms feasible, the skyscrapers of emerging market economies have entered a global dialogue as they negotiate international standards and local identity markings. In this process, however, the world cities have taken over much supremacy from the nation-states. 2 The financial crisis of the Western world has only temporarily weakened what sometimes has been described in disease metaphors as a veritable skyscraper fever that has spread to large parts of the world and sooner or later will reach Denmark-and perhaps already has done so.
In 1929 the Danish author Johannes V. Jensen was proposing high-rises for Copenhagen and for reasons that are still used in defence of skyscrapers: the dense and high city would dramatically reduce the need for transportation. Instead of invading the countryside with low row houses, these should be stacked and kept within the traditional limits of the city; by doubling the height of the houses, he claimed, it was possible to keep city and countryside separate and avoid city sprawl beyond its former walls. Noise from the streets would be reduced to almost nothing when you move upwards, and heavy traffic should be relegated to the underground. 3 In Denmark the first high-rises (of modest height) were not office buildings owned by banks, insurance companies, or newspapers as in the US, but were in fact expressions of social community-oriented aspirations: Bellahøj, a Le Corbusierinspired residential area, was a counterpoint to other buildings erected on hills in Copenhagen and associated with traditional powers: Frederiksberg Bakke (with a royal castle) and Bispebjerg (with the Church of Grundtvig). 4 It is significant that later the high-rise almost became a typology for hospitals (run by the welfare state), the highest building in Denmark in fact still being Herlev Hospital (1976, 120 m).
Aesthetically it can be claimed that until the last developments in structural engineering, skyscrapers have hardly been catalysts for innovative (inner) spatial configurations. This also applies to the frequently gaudy lobbies that basically appeared as end stations for the space-consuming inner transportation system. Sociologically it has been argued that skyscrapers are raising themselves out of the city without contributing to its vitality. 5 Regardless of what is the case, I would personally be reluctant to attribute inherent characteristics to a specific building type-a typology that probably should not be regarded as a single category, but ought to be subdivided into several types. 6 To my surprise, I have found that a typology based on historical varieties of towers can be useful to some extent in relation to skyscrapers (but it is something that I cannot go into in this connection).
It is within the aesthetic field that the project intends to provide new knowledge and competence, and it is based on the experience dimension, the "psycho-geographic" aspect: How is the high and dense city perceived? Despite the main purpose of the project it cannot avoid to include certain sociological (or "anthropological") elements. The chosen perspective entails that only secondarily and in a sporadic way functional and historical issues will be taken in consideration, and what structural engineering concerns, it will only be addressed as far as it supports the main track of the project. The use of steel skeleton or (reinforced) concrete, for example, became at a time (especially the twenties) almost a dividing line between American and European endeavours within the field. 7 The skin of the skyscraper-for instance multiple layers of climate screens or glass coating-is, of course, a special field for innovation that has aesthetic implications. In the existing literature, skyscrapers are predominantly discussed as individual architectural works. Even though you can argue that the individual skyscraper aspires to an almost urban scale, it is not single skyscrapers that are the focus for my surveyeven though they will occur-but the city they are part of and to the creation of which they contribute. The selected skyscraper concentrations must, therefore, comprise various geographic areas and represent starting points in different types of street networks, unequal terrain conditions etc.
It is part of the project's objective to examine the way in which skyscrapers are placed in cities of substantially different provenance and diverse visual and functional design. How the varied parts of the research field are to be balanced against each other are subject of an assessment that cannot be determined in advance-the level of descriptive and analytical detail will necessarily vary. But it is obvious that the whole field somehow must be represented in order to meet the comparative aspect.

APPROACH AND METHOD
The constituents that are addressed can be summarized in the following three sets of questions to the subject, each with its In short: How is the skyscraper city experienced? How is it talked about? What can we learn from it?
Methodologically I shamelessly apply a pluralistic strategy using concepts of different provenance-without feeling an obligation to engage in exegesis of particular theory formations.
Here, as anywhere, it is of special importance to avoid labellike concepts that disrupt understanding at just the point where it should begin-instead of making use of them as a motor for further understanding. None the less the adopted perspectives are basically two: a phenomenological and a discursive approach.
The phenomenological-and perception psychologicalviewpoint is an important prerequisite for the analysis. Even though many skyscrapers' bases at street level seek to connect them with edifices of a more customary scale, it is a significant feature of the skyscraper that the beholder find it more than difficult to relate his or her body to the colossal building-despite the fact that it is extensively subject to anthropomorphic projections (e.g. the tripartite division of the body and the column).
Traditional cities are exploiting dominant horizontal axes.
What happens when a part of the urban axes is tilted upwards?
Forward movement is as a rule connected with ascent. If space in front of us is experienced as a modality of will and therefore designates our future-a space we want to cross as a projection of our efforts to reach a goal-then there is certainly something peculiar about the perspective of the skyscraper: It is a space that we cannot enter. But discourse analysis will also be carried out in other contexts, e.g. the notions of specific cities. Such more or less mythical conceptions are not just something secondary; they are more than mere appendages to the city.
Generally, the discourse analysis aims at exposing the tracks that our statements are inclined to follow when we are talking within a particular area. The objective of the study in this framework is to map the patterns that currently and historically have been unfolded in verbalisations concerning the skyscraper and the vertical city. Such conceptual structures delineate patterns for our attention.
Consequently, it is an assignment for the project to identifyalso rival-key terms that provide the discursive field with vectors, organise the other concepts, and in this way make an analytic proposal concerning semantic connections and couplings.
Discourses are not, however, monolithic blocks, but regardless of their character a number of (frequently opposed) key concepts will normally act as magnets for other terms bundling them together in associative patterns. On a plain level, it is evident that the designation "towers" rather than "skyscrapers" in the Danish debate has served to integrate the skyscraper in a tradition and make potentially controversial projects seem more innocent.
Metaphorically, space and time are systematically interacting when we are plotting territories of reality on each other in order to be able to think the world and orientate ourselves in it. In this context, I will draw on inspiration from recent metaphor theory, which has received important impulses from a phenomenological emphasis on the body as a moving base for interacting with the surroundings. 11 This is an important perspective if you want to avoid maintaining the skyscraper and the city as static objects on a pictorial level. Cities can generally be submitted to a description (a is beside or in front of b) or narrative (a is after or before b); to say that a is "next to" b is already a translation from space to time.
But the skyscraper city is, in my view almost intrinsically adapted for a kind of narrative.
Both perspectives can be elucidated by photographic, cinematic, and literary representations of skyscraper cities.
In all three contexts, they oscillate between the two urban archetypes of the West, having opposed semantic attribution: Babel and Jerusalem. At any rate, you may ask how the cities are branding themselves? How is their (touristic) self-representation on postcards or websites? It is almost always possible to find a photographic viewpoint where a skyscraper city assumes a neat pyramid outline, and Dubai seems adapted or even conceived for internet representation. And as to cinematic representations: Why do skyscraper cities in a particular degree seem to elicit omnipotent flight fantasies? You get the impression that the towering void between the skyscrapers is a permanent challenge that invites the superheroes to perform an air ballet of pursuit and escape; they are literally at par with the city that offers hiding places and cover for ambush attacks. 12

PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
The phenomenological approach is suitable for examining how the appearance of the skyscraper city is changing depending on Our equilibrium sense is attacked, and we tend to lose the sense of scale when experiencing our body engulfed by excessive dimensions of buildings that potentially transcend themselves: you always have the feeling that they could be higher.
In my opinion, the skyscraper generally attests to an aesthetic of distance and projecting. What is near and bounded to the earth tends to being experienced as heavy, material, limited-perhaps also warm, dark and mixed. What is distant and soaring, on the contrary, is perceived as light (in a double sense), immaterial, unlimited, clear and clean. 13 Associating upwards and forwards I think that the skyscraper to a large extent is perceived as a project in a literal sense: a plan-in Danish "et ud-kast"-something that we throw ahead of ourselves, pro-jecting it further forward in space and in the line of our onward motion. Thus it can be conceived as a statement or expression of will directed away from traditional restrictions and towards the future.
In a way, skyscrapers are organised around channels of (upward) motion-eventually with a hierarchy of the pace made possible-but recent skyscrapers are often detached from roads on one hand but on the other hand linked to their speed in a more direct way which we find in older cities where speed levels were graduated and mediated in relation to the buildings. Different skyscraper cities' rhythm is worth examining in detail, but I believe that a sort of acceleration is inherent in the typology and that it has a social impact.
On an urban scale, the function of a regular street network such as the grid may be seen as preventing the skyscraper city from visually clogging because straight intersecting streets direct the gaze toward their vanishing points. In contrast, strong claustrophobia is sensed when skyscrapers are located in urban structures with irregular streetscapes (e.g. New York's financial district): As soon as a more cohesive street wall turns, it becomes intrusive as a mass. Not least because of a heavily sloping terrain, the same is true in Hong Kong where traffic density in the Central District and Wanchai-but not only there-has been counteracted by a system of walkways between the skyscrapers.
As independent traffic arteries, they are only partially aligned with the road network and are constantly sucked into the buildings that they connect. Consequently, the skyscraper's more representative reception systems are typically displayed along these superimposed connection routes. Often, the base or "starting point" of the buildings is in a way shifted upwards, leaving the level below to traffic entrances, garages and service functions.
The result is an uncertainty as to determine the ground level-a feature that you find in many skyscraper cities. The necessity of huge excavations can be supposed to invite the establishment of underground shopping malls and sunken piazzas. The city's verticality is striving upwards but also directed downwards. In Dubai, the viewer is drawn through a dynamic, cinematic process that stages the city as a ceaseless movement in an everpresent game between a horizontal expansion and vertical catapulting of the gaze.

DISCURSIVE PATTERNS
Situated somewhere between phenomenology and discourse analysis-and linking the two approaches-is "the image of the city" in the sense that we are applying metaphors to the citymetaphors through which we perceive and conceptualize the city. As with living creatures, we attribute birthdays, identity and human features to the city. In a traditional vein, the allegories of Almost without exception, American cities form lattice patterns, and the grid, in many contexts, functions as a sign for rationality that is carried on vertically in the "curtain walls"; in its sublime infinity it can turn into a kind of empty transcendence. Mondrian associated with the female and horizontal). 19 Similar notions have been growing on the other side of the Atlantic, but as expected, it is predominantly the various American discourses that have set the agenda, and it must be assumed that they will been challenged by the Eastern development, just as one can also hypothesise that it generally promotes a mediation between the global and the national (or local) in a kind of "glocalisation." You can often read the power constellations of the traditional European city from the height of the buildings. In the skyscraper city, the buildings most often exhibit a competition that, in a sense, compromise collective values; they struggle to define the city centre and can be seen as a seismograph for power strugglesalmost like family towers in northern and central Italian cities (but of course to another degree associated with economic strategies to upgrade and develop building sites).

PREMISES, ASSUMPTIONS AND THESES
It is a premise for the project that the skyscraper city must be seen Typically, a visual track is created that is accentuated by a possible counteraction from lateral horizontals. Thus, as a kind of dramatisation of the skeleton's vertical steel rails are often laid out for the flight of a soaring glance, for example in the form of unbroken pilasters, which are awarded figure quality by lying on top of (broken) horizontal spandrel panels. The middle of the building, which in a narrative analogy would correspond to a transformation, has become a place where nothing happens.
Floors for technical equipment can divide the route, but otherwise the middle is typically an area where repetition and lack of difference cause the gaze to slide off and skate from one element to another, a kind of minimalist infinity principle-we are not able to retain the floors in order to count them-and sometimes the movement's utmost goal is not contained in the building but seems to transcend it. In the same way, a continuous glass skin Television programs about individual skyscrapers seem almost invariably to shape a narrative focused upon how the building teams are overcoming severe challenges and how they against all odds succeed in meeting tight deadlines and in the end beat some records or invent a cutting-end technique. Similarly, on a level that is more inherent to the building typology, it is one of my central theses that most iconic skyscrapers-and skyscraper clusters-are exploiting some kind of architectural narrative. The base, middle and terminations of towers can be dramatised and staged in myriad ways that has to be described and systematised.
And skyscraper clusters relate to each other or the rest of the city in different ways.
The variation in skyscraper design has only increased with new East Asian skyscrapers. Some Chinese skyscrapers, I think, have begun to work with a "bird's eye view," where the view from an aircraft arriving at a city is incorporated in the city's architectureperhaps also taking into account the fact that Chinese monumental architecture has traditionally made the roof construction its most articulated element.
With the skyscraper city as grounded in "intensive symbolism," I will propose a concept that I believe can summarise a number of the characteristics of the skyscraper city, the term being capable of comprising semantic and phenomenological aspects. It poses the opposite of "extensive symbolism" as related to ground possession, and thus a social form in which the increase of wealth was connected with the ownership of large land holdings. 20 The constructing of a skyscraper or a skyscraper city has regularly become symbolically associated with building a nation or a community, and so it becomes an important general question how such associations are transformed in the global exchange between cultures.