Skylines and Identities

July 6, 2007

The skyscraper has a special role in the process of city creation: it creates a city as a city in the imagination of the public. Think of a large city, now think of the symbolic building that sets the city apart.. makes it more than a clump of tall windowed bla-bla-bla structures. The importance of this symbolic tall building is evident on sports broadcasts where at the start the audience gets the obligatory view of the skyline from a circling blimp. The distinctive skyscraper is a visual handle for the imagination.

I started thinking about skyscrapers last week as I finished a fascinating book: The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. There were of course no skyscrapers in Ottoman times. They were faced with a peculiar challenge in the 16th century: how to stamp an Ottoman identity upon cities that had recently been added to their empire. The answer was not to raze the cities and start over.. making it a truly Ottoman city. The strategy was instead to adopt the previous framework but add significant structures that re-focus and re-imagine the city.

For the pedestrian strolling in Aleppo at the end of the Ottoman period, all the minarets would have been, in a sense, contemporary. The most prominently visible ones, however, date from the sixteenth century when the large institutional complexes, which they surmount, were constructed. The distinctive Ottoman silhouettes of these complexes—their low hemispherical domes and graceful pencil-shaped minarets—redefined the skyline of Aleppo. [27]

The Ottoman's had a distinctive visual style.. most evident from the spectacular skyline of Istanbul (seen below in a postcard image):

You can see those pencil-shaped minarets and distinctive domes. To create an Ottoman identity this style of mosque was repeated at visually important sites within newly added cities. A city like Aleppo would have had many mosques and minarets from earlier time periods, but, as Watenpaugh argues, the visitor would have been most struck by the presence of distinctly Ottoman architecture. This architecture is not simply "beautiful".. it does some cultural heavy-lifting as it symbolically marks a city as being Ottoman.

These distinctive mosques were built through a patronage system that allowed wealthy officials to tie down a portion of their wealth in perpetuity in order to support a charitable institution.. like a mosque. So the construction of Ottoman Aleppo was not a centralized project, but the inevitable result of a system that encouraged expansive construction.

So back to the skyscrapers. I would argue that something quite similar is going on in modern cities. The skyscraper is a visual marker for what we in America consider a "city". (European cities have a different visual language, and therefore resist skyscrapers.) The point is not for every city to construct an exact replica of the Empire State Building.. rather to construct a unique form of the skyscraper. These buildings, sitting on our skylines, visually proclaim: "city".

So why do Asian cities excel now at skyscrapers? I am sure the price of land has something to do with it.. and the resultant push upward. I would think that more important is the symbolic value of the skyscraper. When Kuala Lampur or Shanghai constructs an imposing skyscraper, these cities are not claiming to be part of America.. that would be absurd. They are positioning themselves as part of the globalized economy. The skyscraper has gone from being a symbol of American urban identity to being one for engagement with the global market.

If this is correct, the skyscraper now functions a lot like an Ottoman mosque. It is a marker that a city belongs to a certain global regime. Skyscrapers arise from an odd system of corporate patronage. Corporations are a lot like Ottoman officials, their true responsibility being not to a local economy but to shareholders scattered everywhere. Nevertheless there is mutual benefit to be had for a corporation in cultivating of a relationship with a city.. and the result are structures that are not just functional, but add to the prestige of a city.. and finally create a symbolically loaded skyline.