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!

Click to filter posts by the three main subjects for the blog : Architecture, Flight and Mountains.

Anecdotes : Earning the Summit
Anecdotes Christopher James Botham Anecdotes Christopher James Botham

Anecdotes : Earning the Summit

I recently had the opportunity to summit Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and the experience brought to light a few aspects of verticality for me. It’s the tallest peak in the Northeast US, famous for it’s erratic weather patterns. As such, it’s been commercialized with a cog railway, auto road, visitor center and museum in order to attract tourist dollars to the park. This makes for an interesting summit experience, which is quite different than a typical mountaintop. Put simply, this is a summit you don’t have to earn by climbing up to it.

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Anecdotes : A Tale of Two Apartments
Anecdotes Christopher James Botham Anecdotes Christopher James Botham

Anecdotes : A Tale of Two Apartments

Over the past few years, I've had two very different living experiences. The first, a 48th floor apartment in the Financial District of New York City. The second, a first floor flat in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I loved living in each of these apartments immensely, but the differences between the two have taught me a great deal about Verticality and its effects on our lives.

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Verticality, Part IV: Beating the System
Verticality Christopher James Botham Verticality Christopher James Botham

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.

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