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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The Tree and the Skyscraper
Pictured above is a cutaway drawing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s SC Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin, built in 1936. This little tower is famous for its structure, which functions like a tree. There’s a central trunk, or core, with floors cantilevering off it like branches. This removes the need for any perimeter columns since all the structural loads transfer back to the central core. There’s also the large taproot foundation, as Wright called it. This functions like the roots of a tree, providing stability to the overall form. Wright was well aware of the tree metaphor, and he used it to sell the vision to his client. It wasn’t the first time he tried to make a tower structure function like a tree, but it’s quite possibly the purist example of the metaphor to ever get built.
“Towers have always been erected by humankind - it seems to gratify humanity’s ambition somehow and they are beautiful and picturesque.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect, 1867-1959
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Skyscraper Proposal
Frank Lloyd Wright was an outspoken advocate for low-density cities without skyscrapers. With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the tower design pictured above came from Wright. It’s called The Illinois, and it was planned to be a mile (1,609 meters, or 5,280 feet) in height. That’s more than four times the height of the Empire State Building, and nearly twice the height of the Burj Dubai.
Verticality, Part IV: Beating the System
Homo Sapiens becomes the first animal to escape the food chain
Monkeys and apes are vulnerable creatures. Our source-code was built for a life in the trees, and on our own we lack any natural means of defending ourselves. Compared to other animals that evolved to survive on the savannah, we have no claws or fangs, we’re not particularly quick, and we don’t have natural camouflage. This makes us dangerously vulnerable to predators, and meant we needed to find another evolutionary niche in order to survive. Our answer was power in numbers.