ABSTRACT
‘These towers, that people are calling “sky-scrapers”, are closer to hell than they are to heaven’, noted the review Le Mois littéraire et pittoresque in 1909. Although ignored by historians of architecture studying skyscrapers, the recurrence of this type in travel journals, the literary press, and novels from the end of the nineteenth century to between-the-wars France is indispensable for understanding the interaction between narratives of urban development and the changing city. In the corpus collected, whether the skyscraper is merely a background figure in the story or its main character, whether it is published on the front page of a journal or not, this literary material constitutes an intellectual atmosphere: in a context of sceptical fascination regarding the modern world, the skyscraper and the American city integrate, through these narratives, the debate on the future of Paris.
