The Future of Architecture is Horizontal.
As a child, I was obsessed with skyscrapers, with the grandeur and prestige of height, the towering ambition signaled by these towers, of their extreme cost and the delicacy of their engineering. I followed the building of the world’s tallest structures with anticipation, seeing narratives of progress in who could set a capstone at the highest crest. Squarely into the third decade of the 21st century, this obsession with height looks and feels childish. Absent gimmicks like Dubai, the future — and present — of architecture is horizontal. The horizontal is the only real theater with anything substantial to say.
One could as well call the future of Architecture ‘female,’ with the conceit that the male function of architecture is to consolidate and engineer life and ‘make a living,’ and the female to nurture, transport, and provide for life and its sustenance. The anthropomorphic phallocentrism of the city tower is a direct contrast to the underground, womblike presence of a major transit hub. While gendered labels are culturally reductive; I will stick with ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal,’ but there is a precedent for them. The capitalist elite have governed America and stewarded their assets and corporations from the high castle of skyscrapers and signaled importance with their penthouse aeries, while the division of labor to their their ‘philanthropist’ wives who reigned over culture and civic standing via patronage of horizontal constructions like theaters, parks, and museums. The gendered analogies remain resonant, but I will stick with ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ for precision.
Vertical structures are for the few, to be seen by the many. Horizontal structures though often constructed and governed by the few, are made for the many, to be experienced intimately, directly, for the many. Together, these structures support the life of our great cities, and thus shape our cultures and civilizations.
Horizontal and vertical architectural functions have vied in importance over the ages. The vertical and the horizontal aspects of city design have long enjoyed a kind of ‘alchemical marriage’ in building and maintaining a city’s ethos. Vertical buildings consolidate wealth, horizontal buildings cater to life and culture. However, there is reason that the horizontal is the only piece which can speak to the public here, which has anything to say or which can be said after the vast vertical gutting of the Bauhaus movement, 100 years in: the vertical is less interesting, more expensive, and less adapted to the world of the 21st century. Barring a few dick-measuring contests like high finance, vertical prestige signaling will go the way of the Space Race or the Russian Aristocracy — into a museum. Yet it is the horizontal spaces, like museums, transit centers, performance halls, collective housing, and parks, which now have something to say.
The horizontal is a canvas designed to cater to the masses, to allow them to breathe in and out of cities, to serve them nature in public parks or art in museums and auditoriums. The tower is a treasure-house and power-signaling of the elites, while the horizontal is where, on occasion, these trophies are displayed for the rest, to protect and signal the city’s prominence. Nowhere in the world is this contrast and connection more directly displayed than New York City.
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New York is a study in verticality, in its promise and its limitations, and its necessary compromise with the horizontal. The city was once first and foremost a seaport and trading hub, bridging the East and Hudson rivers, linking to the Midwest through the Erie Canal and railroad system. Standing at the nexus of these horizontal arteries of trade, New York was the place where business with Europe and the rest of the nation was concluded. It captured the flow of these horizontal distribution networks, rail, river, and ocean shipping lanes, and used this horizontal capture to grow upwards into the vertical. This process accelerated as urban density increased and skyscraper technology gradually improved.
The case of Standard Oil beautifully illustrates this evolution. John Rockefeller developed oil monopoly on Pennsylvania crude, refined it in Cleveland, and piped and railroaded it to Jersey for export. His first headquarters was in New York, a sixteen story on lower broadway, one of the tallest and most impressive buildings of its time. By 1926, it was 560 feet tall and had a replica of the Mausoleum of Parnassus at the top, lit by kerosene, the original monopoly of the Standard Oil crude empire. His own mansion was on 54th street, near Central Park, far from the hubbub of commerce, and he took his carriage to work downtown each morning. Economic growth was still based in lower manhattan due to its proximity to the ports, but with the evolution of the Railroad industry and ease of shipping, this influence was ebbing. Oil would of course allow the vertical to dominate ever more areas of the horizontal, as it expanded the range of urban commuters to the far suburbs and accelerated global commerce and shipping dominions. It is fitting that the Rockefeller’s would be lords of Manhattan vertical for a century.
His son, David, eventually commissioned Rockefeller Center near the family house in Midtown. Advances in technology allowed it to soar 66 stories above the ground at 850 feet, completed in 1933. he value of Manhattan real estate and the buildout of shipping hubs diminished the importance and prestige of downtown real estate. Midtown was the new hub of economic growth, and the skyscrapers there soared into new vertical heights, led by the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, iconic symbols of American innovation and prowess. ’30 Rock’ was home of the National Broadcasting Company, which translated the ascent into the vertical into the airwaves: the vertical was beginning to transcend physical distance, and New York was more a hub of capital and talent than a happy accident of geography.
The move away from the oceanfront was formally completed in the reign of Robert Moses, who ringed Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and the Bronx with a chastity belt of highways and bridges, limiting the connection of New York with its surrounding nature. All the great masted ships which framed the romantic old city were long gone, and trade had moved to nearby ports like Elizabeth NJ. The city was a hub of money — trading centered there, the physical act of shipping moved elsewhere, and this development built out Midtown in the boxy bauhaus style. Focus again shifted downtown with the construction of the original World Trade Center, financed by David Rockefeller, grandson of John D. Rockefeller, an anchor of Manhattan’s financial firms.
This evolution towards the capture of pure trade, not just shipping and the control of physical substances, is echoed in the design ethos of the 60s and 70s — the architectural brutalism of massive, imposing rectangles and their stark anchoring of global capital into the skyline. Location and geography were less important here — the sheer massed power of the vertical was king. The original WTC was both the starkest, most powerful building in the world, and a metaphor for American power. Its only corollary in the horizontal was the largest office building in the world: the Pentagon: five stories in a concentric ring symbolizing the American military, the force guaranteeing free trade and the architect of the American economic hegemony.
9/11 was an assault on both of these structures. The strike to the pentagon was the more symbolic — as for obvious reasons, it is more difficult to topple a horizontal building than a vertical one. The devastation of twin 747s plowing into lower manhattan shifted the center of trade again to Midtown, and the array of financial firms, hedge funds, and family offices scattered about their glass and steel towers did not relocate far.
The complex at Hudson Yards, finished in 2018, seems a return to nature as its tech and finance tenants can see the river from their lofty perches, and its location near the ocean is a reminder of the nature of Manhattan and its oceanic, trade-based origins which were long distanced from. Since trade is now captained in digital space, since physical travel is mostly air-based, and the ports of New York limited to cruise vessels and ferries rather than the slags of commerce, architecture is reclaiming the coastline and bending a knee to the therapeutic power of nature. The project is a commercial success and aided in adding value and verticality to an area which was a derelict transit hub, but has not rewritten the architecture of the city.
The benevolent NYC dictatorship of Imperator Bloomberg brought with gentrification a revitalization of Manhattan and Brooklyn’s coastline, with gorgeous parks springing up, bicycle lanes, car-free zones preferencing pedestrians and tourist trade. Now that New York’s big business is almost entirely consummated in the ‘cloud,’ its manufacturing carried out elsewhere, the relevance of the city to capture creative talent and tend to its horizontal quality of life matters now more than ever. Its nature is transitioning from commerce to leisure, its vertical outsourced beyond physicality. Its horizontal is now the most productive place of focus, the instrument which will determine its continued relevance as a global center of trade and culture.
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The fate of our monuments — by and large, privately funded horizontal spaces — ebbs and floes with public and political sentiment. Philanthropy used to be expected of our millionaire and billionaire classes as entree to the social elite, though this philanthropy was largely concerned with boosting the prestige of American art and culture relative to Europe. Robber barons and railroad tycoons massaged their reputation by building stone piles on the edges of Central Park, buying up European collections and the odd monastery, and importing them to New York City. Industrial tycoon A will see your Carravagio and raise you a DaVinci. Prestige signaling became the way to signify social graces among the new elite, and ensure a permanent place in the nation’s social register. Governments co-sponsored museums with the patronage of the highest elite, Masonic sigils dotting the proudest storehouses of world culture. America was carrying the torch of the West, as the mosaics and bronzes of Rockefeller Center or the Telephone Company proudly displayed. Even stadiums for simulated bloodsport were co-finacned as public-private partnerships, and these have been the last to diminish into the private sphere, given the popularity of sport among the masses. The days when the elite used their vertical wealth to sponsor cultural projects in the horizontal left a rich legacy, though they appear to have ended.
After America came to utterly dominate world politics post-WWII, the need for prestige public projects ebbed away. Instead of national grandeur, taxpayers and politicians focused on the drain from public coffers of these monuments. At the same time, billionaires were no longer pressured to give back to society to preserve their social standing, largely retreating from the public eye behind their gated compounds. The infrastructure of the city was already built out, so commuters shuffled through aging infrastructure in the echo of the Gilded era, at best eternally passing through Grand Central’s brass and marble. Post-WWII megaliths like the WTC were void of outer symbolism, girded in the steel and concrete of 70s era brutalism, an American Gothic absent explicit aim, the ambition inherent in the monstrosity of sheer form. And they would have stood unaltered for another hundred years. New projects like the Oculus are rare, and require an extraordinary stimulus — say, the impact of two fully fueled 747 jets into the tallest towers in Babylon — to come to fruition and get funding. The political risk of a boondoggle is far greater than the benefit of public sentiment of a success — especially because due to regulations, unions, and a host of other difficulties it takes more time to build mega projects than the average term in office for an elected politician.
The era of corporatization — and the invention of New York as a new hub for the New World, vying in prominence with the old capitals of Europe — has already come and, like the white dove that inspired Calatrava’s Oculus, flown the coop. Its new towers — WiFI towers — are now disrupting expensive physical hubs as consolidators of corporate power. Cities like New York will still be necessary meetings of the body-minds, but they will be diminished in importance for economic reasons, as the tide that created their rising retreats on a digital wave. This will leave a lot of half-empty towers in want of filling, and few compelling reasons to build more. In the West, already overbuilt for its host population, the libido of creation has sublimated to serve other, subtler forms.
Now that corporate towers have shifted into invisible broadcast frequencies, and the Silicon Valley headquarters which house their few remaining workers are glass-walled Xanadus, the tower is broadcast into our skulls. Cell phones and their globe-straddling towers are proof of purchase for participation in the modern economy. In the developed world, without the space, the will, the zoning, or the sexual thrust to build above 500 meters, horizontal spaces are the only physical artifacts with anything to say which will resonate.
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What do vertical buildings have to teach Americans of the 2020s? Next to nothing. We’ve long since won the global trade battle and are ‘tired of winning,’ we don’t demand fresh phallic monuments to announce our dominance, and are happy to outsource these to Dubai and Shanghai. The strongest tech corporations shun towers on principle, seeing them as inefficient and anti-social relics and building horizontal office parks full of green life and broad clean communal open office space. If Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ thesis on monopolies applies to architecture, it is likely tech companies prefer not to announce to old-world legislators the real dominance their new-school monopolies have over the voting public’s attention and time by building towers trumpeting the industry’s massive wealth. Skyscrapers, like many relics of the human ego, are inefficient; they have diminishing returns in overbuilt, unionized, zoning-lawed metropolises; they cannot be seen from the land, and their only justification is the charge for the view from the 100th floor. They are prohibitively expensive to heat, cool, and power the lifts which take up an increasing proportion of the surface area as the buildings taper to ridiculous heights. They are symbols of hierarchy, dividing corporations and the stratification of city life, with the biggest dogs on top, in their pressurized cabins, an eternal business class flight, a $100m penthouse with ikea furnishings, swapped back and forth between CEOs and Saudis. For the few who can afford the status signaling it’s a fun game, but with the maturity of internet work-from-home culture, the vertical is no longer the peak of civilization. It’s not where new life is being created, just hoarded and displayed.
Horizontal spaces are the only instructional ones left to us moderns — they are where art is housed and people flow, where nature is afforded a place and where quality of life can blossom. They are where the future of Earth is made.
There are two relevant spaces remaining and expanding in the vertical: Wifi towers and rocket ships. You will find most newly minted multibillionaires straddling the two. Rockets extend the skyscraper to go beyond the bounds of the planet, seeking other worlds to inseminate with progress and expansion of the human dream. Wifi towers and satellites transcend height, broadcasting messages to the entire population to guide human attention. These have rendered the physical tower obsolete, save for decoration and power-signaling. Only the insecure build towers or seek to live in them.
Wireless transmission towers are the curveball in this equation as they are simultaneously supremely vertical and dominate civic interactivity in what were previously horizontal spaces, with extreme consequences to the nature of civilization and our primate brains. They reach higher and signal farther than the tallest buildings, and bidding for limited broadcast frequencies or URLs means that a few corporations will control the means of cultural connection for the many. They are a tower. Vertical. Yet they extend into the horizontal, becoming a new public square via our little pocket rectangles, allowing everyone at least the semblance of ‘fair play’ participation in reality even as a far smaller people become ‘influencers’ and professionalize their attention-getting. They are horizontal. Furthermore, their occupation of the public square does not necessarily include relationships with other flesh and blood humans, which previously constituted culture. Lacking the exposure therapy to other beings, many humans are growing anemic, in a realm where a disguised vertical power can replicate the horizontal connectivity once required for successful hunter-gatherer bands to form and endure. Through wifi towers and sattelites, the vertical is ‘devouring’ the horizontal, replicating its function while hollowing out its domain, in the brain and in our greater civic structures. Its adherents become memetic replicators of the vertical, thinking they are engaging in horizontal civic space. Perhaps this is the true meaning of ‘going viral’ — the virus of the vertical wireless towers dominating the domain of the horizontal?
Virtually all the big tech corps now have their headquarters in open office plans in horizontal parks. Even Apple, with its arty Stormtrooper aesthetic, is camped in a mile-wide hyper loop a mere three stories tall. Facebook, Google, and all their imitators live close to the ground, where employees can face to face to face in open office concepts. Banks, funds, and the command and control hegemonies of old business and media live in towers. Climb this over a lifetime, they say, and you can win a place closer to the King. Internet billionaires don’t need to worry about corporate politicking, and can pay their workers enough that they don’t complain. They control the vertical structure of their corporations via B shares and their reign is inviolable. They want to get the maximum out of their workers while maintaining control, and they hold the vertical within the firm by expanding and enhancing the horizontal.
Napoleon said it was amazing what a man would do for a piece of metal and a ribbon; Google learned that lunch buffets, in-office gyms, and onsite daycare can command far more loyalty among the modern working elite. In extreme, the brilliant workers of the horizontal numerati live in worlds within worlds, in the hive of an ecosystem to capture and nurture, to calm and rest its charges. They don’t want office coups. There is nowhere ‘up’ to go, and this motivation extends from tech companies and coders to their users, breeding a servile population face-down to their screens. The present is comfortable, functional, and what it lacks in distinction it makes up for in cohesion. The lack of vertical distinction of the present is a feature, not a bug.
This is also true in the architecture of public thought. Stand too far out of the acceptable norm politically, sexually, in expression, and risk being cast out of the comfortable, lucrative (enough) center. The piercing clarity and propaganda of the old elite, with its lighthouses, Chronkites, expert opinions, and sniper rifles, is now the soft, clear, fluorescent middle ground of horizontal tech, with DIY entertainment for spice, sorted by algorithm. Corporations further punish deviation from centrism by aligning with the center-left of the ideological bell curve in order to politically align with actors who would otherwise seek tear down their actual monopoly and distribute their actual power. In the corporate world, however welcome the support, playing identity politics can be the cheapest way to signal allegiance with the masses without actually economically supporting them. Every real monopoly which centralizes the vertical power of the internet must learn to at least feign allegiance with the horizontal, or risk being toppled and split up into separate smaller entities. Social media companies bring marketing to the masses, and learn to market themselves.
Enough with the artificial horizontality of social media. Nature is the ultimate horizontal: a living, self-contained open-air ecosystem which has sustained complex life for hundreds of millions of years. Space is the ultimate vertical — the expansion beyond the bounds of our cradle ad infinitum, both limitless freedom and an almost-certain death without the right conditions. Both are the sources of primitive hope — some propose going back to nature and noble savagery, others Mars colonies and asteroid mining. The best solutions are to refine the horizontal and vertical around us, repurposing materials, investing in urban agriculture and aquaponics, harvesting energy from the sun and the wind to power the regeneration of the earth. Horizontally minded will choose Earth as salvation, Vertically minded the sky and technology, and holistic thinkers will find absolution in the balance. Nothing reveals a persons’ orientation better than where they place their future hope. Trust in the horizontal, seek to serve and expand it. You will be moving with the future.
