ABSTRACT
The architectural competition has found its most accomplished expression with the skyscrapers of New York, designed to take full advantage of the limited available land but also to ensure their builders the glory of having challenged the laws of physics and gravity. It was the 1916 zoning law that truly carved the urban landscape of the heart of the city by forcing plot owners to recoil their structures gradually from the street so as not to deprive anyone of the day light, but without imposing any height limitation. In Trantor, the city-planet imagined by Asimov, the inhabitants even use elevators without cabins to move easily between the different levels of the city: they just advance into the vacuum and move up or down under the influence of antigravity. As for Coruscant, the ecumenopolis could not even exist without the presence of millions of turbo-elevators that maintain a permanent link between the lower parts of each Monad and its higher levels.
