Verticality, Part XII: A Never-ending Struggle

How humanity will never rid itself of the need to escape the surface

This chapter is part of a series that compose the main verticality narrative. The full series is located here.

The preceding work has explored our history with verticality and our struggles to escape the surface of the earth throughout human history. This need for verticality began evolving in us before we were human. It was a combination of our physical context here on earth, our source code from our ancestors who lived in the trees, and our relationship with the environment that we evolved to survive in. This combination resulted in a history filled with attempts to escape the surface we live on. I’ve focused this work on architecture because it’s the most direct cultural indicator for these types of needs. Thus, it was inevitable that we’d develop technologies to build skyscrapers that would put us among the clouds. These buildings provided us a chance to escape the surface, but they also isolated us from it.

As a result, when we build skyscrapers that contain spaces high up in the sky, we should make efforts to recreate the experience of the surface in as many ways as possible. The previous chapter went into detail about our efforts to humanize skyscrapers up to this point, but it also exposed how much further we need to go in order to create a truly human experience when we’re inside these structures.

The closest we’ve come to understanding what it really means to recreate the surface in the sky was at the Dutch Pavilion from the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany. Standing only a few stories tall, its purpose was to push the limits of what could be achieved when different types of space are stacked on top of one another. It provides a perfect use-case for the possibilities and limitations of the spaces we build above the surface.

A section of the Dutch Pavilion from the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany. The building featured a series of stacked spaces that were completely different from one another, and it clearly explores the three concepts of underground, surface, and sky. Image source.

There were three major levels, representing the underground, the surface, and the sky. The underground level was a cave-like space featuring irregular, rock-like forms. The second major level was packed with dense foliage and featured massive columns wrapped in tree-trunks, evoking a well-established forest landscape. This represented the surface, but it was placed well above ground-level. The roof level was open to the sky and featured a series of wind-turbines. These three levels represent the three basic concepts of our surface-based lives: a surface that we stand on, the place below that surface (the underground), and the place above our heads (the sky).

One key takeaway from the Dutch Pavilion was the complete uniqueness of each floor in relation to those above and below it. No two levels are alike. This is the project’s greatest success, but it also illustrates why it’s so hard to achieve in our skyscrapers. Building a skyscraper is a massive undertaking that costs a great deal of money and effort. Because of the inherent costs, these buildings are under great pressure to produce financial returns for their owners. This pressure makes innovation difficult, which is why so many towers get built with identical floors throughout their entire stack. I explored a few ways to humanize the tower experience in the previous chapter, but those examples are expensive, and therefore quite rare in the world of skyscraper design.

Another takeaway from the Dutch Pavilion is the height of its roof. The building only has six levels, which is close to the upper limit that people are willing to climb without a lift. It’s also a height that doesn’t create a sense of isolation when one reaches the top. On the roof, you’re still very much a part of the world around you. These two aspects go a long way to keep the building’s experience human, which can’t be said of any skyscraper in the world. Architects can design skyscrapers to be more human, but at a certain height, a person leaves the surface world behind and ceases to be part of the surrounding surface life. This threshold generally occurs somewhere around the fifth floor of a typical building; above this, people can no longer participate in the world around them.[1]

This isolation and lack of participation is something we must learn to live with, however. The reality is, skyscrapers are here to stay and we’re going to continue to build them all over the world. We can’t stop them from getting built, but we can continue to push for more human experiences in these buildings. We can also make the choice to live high above the ground, cut off from the surface world, or closer to ground level where we can participate in the outdoor environment.

Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting Starry Night Over the Rhône, showing a night view down the river with stars lighting up the sky. Van Gogh was fascinated by the night sky, and he attempted many nighttime paintings, the most famous of which was his iconic The Starry Night.

I conclude by showing another of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of the night sky, this one called Starry Night Over the Rhône. I began this work showing a much more famous painting of his, Starry Night. Each of these paintings is a result of the human fascination with the world above our heads, and as the preceding chapters have shown, human history is full of our attempts to understand and inhabit that space.

Will we ever rid ourselves of our need for verticality? At it’s core, verticality is part of what makes us human, so in order for us to rid ourselves of it, we’d first need to cease being human, or evolve into something else. Therefore, as long as the human race continues to survive on planet Earth, we’ll continue to look up in wonder at the sky and feel a primal need to escape the surface we live on. We’ll continue to climb to the top of mountains and connect the dots of the stars. We’ll continue to pursue space flight and eagerly talk of colonizing other planets. We’ll continue to build skyscrapers as tall as possible in an attempt to satisfy our ego. We’ll continue to do these things because verticality is part of who we are. It’s part of what makes us human.

Click here for more information on the Theory of Verticality.


[1]: Gehl, Jan. Cities for People. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010. 40-42.