Before the fire, before the ash, before the
Bodies tumbling solitary through space, one
Thin skin of glass and metal met another….
Two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.
Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown.
Tragic irony, dramatic paradox, narrative necessity, call it what you will, it is solely on account of the world-shaking catastrophe that architect William Lamb’s ‘palace of dreams’ stands so nobly in the numbing aftermath, once again resplendent and supreme, in Scott Fitzgerald’s words ‘as inexplicable as the sphinx’, a mythic lighthouse of possibility around which the rest of New York’s urban jungle chooses to subordinately arrange itself.
Mark Kingwell’s intellectual mission throughout this multi-disciplinary study is a kind of Grail-like quest for its iconic and simulacral quintessence. Robert Venturi of Philadelphia once told me that the essential architectural element of our time was no longer space nor the enclosure thereof. In his influential opinion, the kernel through which all ‘built organisms’ must now be judged and evaluated is their iconicity and the degree with which it is suffused by hidden communication of meaning.
Unequivocally, Kingwell would agree. He considers the Empire State ‘a potent icon of Western capitalism and ingenuity’, but one that, unlike the ill-fated Twin Towers, was not nearly as crudely related to and associated with unacceptably brash ideas about wealth, greed and free marketeering. The former has always been the tower of Everyman, first and foremost. Thus it inspired a post 9/11 ‘collective tenderness’ as it ‘reappeared’ (at least to many ‘weary cool’ New Yorkers) as a significant presence on the skyline, now ‘a vulnerable finger stretched skyward in hope but all too susceptible to being broken’.
Lest any potential reader feels that Nearest Thing to Heaven is too specialist and academic, I must re-balance the scales, for this book is surely one of the literary highlights of the year. Of course Kingwell (he is, after all, a professor of philosophy) is not averse to gilding the lily or waxing too lyrical on such rarefied arcaneries as Virilio’s notion of endocolonisation, Husserlian phenomenological method, or the dissection of iconic exosymbiants, but these pages can be skipped. He can be just as inspiring on more popular culture.
There is the building’s difficult conception and construction for instance, which probably shouldn’t have happened at all given the idea was first mooted just six weeks before the Wall Street crash of 1929. Larger than life figures such as initiator Alfred E. Smith and rough-diamond financier John Jakob Raskob make their personalities and presence known as they stride across the pages through the mists of time and Kingwell’s contagious recollective skills; whilst every conceivable statistic is collated meticulously for us, and reproduced here in all their magnificently incomparable unlikelihood and superlativity.
Talking of comparisons, who could possible have estimated that for all the materials used in the Empire State’s realisation to be transported at one time, one would have had to load them into a train 57 miles long? Or that if one remodelled the plaster from its walls into an imaginary ‘sidewalk’, then it would stretch from mid-Manhattan to the steps of the Capitol in Washington DC? Models of the ESB have been made in playing cards, soap, matchboxes, plaster of Paris, spun sugar, ice, Lego blocks, cheese, butter, topiary, chocolate, even champagne glasses. It featured too in over 100 motion pictures.
So it may no longer be the tallest building in the world: Taipai 101 at 1,671 feet is the present though undoubtedly short-lived holder of that particular blue riband. And to put that into insignificant perspect- ive, might I suggest you log on to http://www.eng.qmul.ac.uk/MEngProject/Psi/ (from Kingwell’s decidedly state-of-the-art bibliographic essay) for a privileged insight into the even more prodigious heights about to be scaled by ambitious developers? Nobody would ever claim the ESB was the planet’s most elegant high-rise — William van Alen’s more feminine Chrysler would take that prize, I think — yet there will never be any doubt that it is and always will be its most famous.
Now, just as it has since May Day 1931 when President Herbert Hoover illuminated it for the first time by pressing a gold telegraph key wired to New York from the Oval Office, the tower endures. The Empire State is a dominant technological wonder. Penn- sylvania steel married to Indiana limestone. It is an exceptional machine. I’d like to say more but space is as short here as it is on the Big Apple’s grid. Go out now, buy and read this book for yourselves. It is a rare treat.
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