Skyscrapers: A History of the World's Most Extraordinary Buildings -- Revised and Updated Hardcover - 2013

"An eye-popping shelf-scraper...an elevating experience." (Gene Shalit, "Today")

"You may get vertigo looking at Skyscrapers..." (The New York Times)

Like towering divas, skyscrapers command the urban stage. They hold us enthralled, leaving us anticipating and half-fearing their next majestic manifestation. The roles played by the skyscraper and many: they are icons of cities, stars of movies, symbols of corporate power, and the place where many of us report to work every morning. Deemed both avatars and annihilators of civilized life, they have been praised as efficient space-savers and denounced as rapacious consumers of light and air. In short, the skyscraper's bold visual gestalt, one layered with multiple meanings, has become a complex metaphor for all that is good and bad about the twentieth century. (Judith Dupre, from the Foreword)

I think the interesting question is why does man want to build to the sky? What is there about the desire for domination, or to reach God, or for private pride - the Pyramids are an example of that, but the tall building is certainly another. Every civilization is touched by that desire... They all reached for a dominant height. The impulse may have been different, but that's a common feeling of must culture. (Philip Johnson, from the Introductory Interview)