ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into two parts. The first examines debates about tall buildings in the City through the lens of the Royal Fine Art Commission. It shows that while, in the first half of the twentieth century, the commission suggested that aesthetic values and profit-driven building height are in a relation that is full of tensions, in the second half, it started to reframe the latter and proposed that profit-driven towers can result in visual advantages for the city. Drawing on Rancière and Benjamin, the chapter discusses this reframing and develops a distinction between beautification and aestheticisation, which, politically speaking, links to a distinction between conservative and radical approaches to the cityscape. In the second part of this chapter, a critique of understanding the skyline as a representation that is representative of the city as a whole is developed further by taking up the notion of nomad space. Discussing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s notion of the monad in detail, an understanding of the skyline as a perspective in which the whole city is expressed is developed.
