Welcome to On Verticality. This blog explores the innate human need to escape the surface of the earth, and our struggles to do so throughout history. If you’re new here, a good place to start is the Theory of Verticality section or the Introduction to Verticality. If you want to receive updates on what’s new with the blog, you can use the Subscribe page to sign up. Thanks for visiting!
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Alternate Realities : The Washington Monument
Pictured above is a proposal for the Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills sometime around 1845. It was the winning entry of a design competition established in 1835 by the Washington National Monument Society. This design is the second of three structures that Robert Mills proposed or built for a monument to G.W., and each is based on verticality in some way.
The Magic City
Pictured above is an illustration by Russian architectural theorist Arthur Skizhali-Weiss. It’s part of a series called The Magic City, which includes fictional realities dreamed up by the architect from 1999 to 2014. Apart from being an interesting composition of architectural forms, it embodies a few themes related to verticality.
Bipedalism and The Skyscraper
I came across this diagram the other day, and it immediately struck me. It was drawn in 2003 by James Wines of SITE for his Antilia Tower project, and it superimposes a human body on top of a tower section. I’ve previously written about the conceptual link between the bipedal human body and the tower, but this diagram takes it a step further and matches the functions of each part of the body to each part of the tower.
Zeus, Poseidon and Hades : The Verticality of the Greek Gods
Nearly all ancient belief systems are based on the surface, the underground, and the sky in some way. These three concepts represent something primal for humans, and throughout history we’ve attached myriad meanings and stories to the relationship between them. Typically, they’re either represented by an abstract concept or a god. An example of the former is the Christian idea of heaven and hell. An example of the latter is the Ancient Greek gods Zeus and Hades.
Saverio Dioguardi's Tribune Tower Proposal
Every time I research the Chicago Tribune Tower competition, I run into this proposal by Italian architect Saverio Dioguardi. His design is wonderfully flamboyant, and it’s more of a monument than a building. There’s something eye-catching about the sheer audacity of it, however, which is why I’ve singled it out here.
Verticality, Part VII: Heavens on Earth
Humanity’s first major attempts to recreate heaven on earth
In the previous section, we explored ancient civilizations and how they utilized Verticality in their architecture. In each of these civilizations, building a structure that connected the surface to the sky was seen as the pinnacle of human achievement. This was done to appease or satisfy some type of god or gods, and untold amounts of time and effort were spent on the road to achieving it. Throughout time, however, the needs of our gods would begin to see competition from the needs of humanity, or our own Ego.