ABSTRACT
From the thirty-fifth floor of a downtown office tower that dominates the new Atlanta skyline, one can see two problems that all architects of high-rise buildings face. The question is how to bring the thing to an end gracefully before gravity and money do so. Some architects just quit, hence the flat roof. But most embellish the finale in various ways with one kind of flourish or another, each somewhat more outlandish than the one built the year before. The result, what some call “an interesting skyline,” is a kind of fever chart of the collected psyches of architects and their clients that shape the modern megalopolis. The results, however, are more than just show. These are the buildings that contribute greatly to traffic congestion, poverty, climatic change, pollution, biotic impoverishment, and land degradation. If less visually dramatic, the same could be said of the designers of the modern suburb and shopping mall. In both cases the problem is that the art and science of architecture and related applied disciplines has been whittled down by narrow gauge thinking.
