07 January 2016
To The Tower
by J.R.Thomas
Many a wealthy man with an urge to make his mark permanent has, ever since the birth of the building trade, tried to build as high as he could. The Tower of Babel should perhaps have called an early end to this form of vanity, but no, the vain signalling their own presence and the religious reaching up to the heavens continued to build towers, spires, minarets, pyramids, and great statues; things in which there might be no utility or economic sense but which represented a towering human triumph.
Modern technology, modern wealth, modern vanity, and most of all, the invention of the electric lift, have brought this urge to build upwards to almost absurd and perhaps dangerous heights. Those awaiting the New Year in Dubai might have reflected on the perils of high-rise when the sixty three floor Address Hotel dramatically caught fire and within a very short time became a welcoming beacon for the New Year. What seemed like an appalling disaster was not so bad as initially feared – the outside skin of the building, made of a highly inflammable composite of polyurethane and aluminium, had caught alight. Though terrifying for those inside and close by, the building itself, being made of triple glazed glass cladding, steel and concrete, resisted the flames more robustly, and there were only sixteen persons injured, none of them seriously.
Quite why a building of such (or indeed, any) height should be skinned with combustible materials, and how widely used around the world the technique is, is now the subject of various enquiries. And the whole nasty incident is once again raising concerns about the love of modern architects and particularly developers for building very high buildings. Both professions have leapt to their own defence – towers, they say, are engineered to be especially safe, with carefully protected escape shafts and protected zones; they are earthquake proof – a tower will sway alarmingly but because of the sheer size and depth of its foundations it will not collapse, whilst older and low rise buildings are more inclined to buckle and turn to rubble; new fire fighting and rescue tactics are being developed so that rescue workers and fire crews can easily reach much higher and faster than currently; evacuation measures are ever more sophisticated, though still not hugely user friendly for the unfit on the hundredth floor of an office building.
Nor do the economics of very tall buildings, especially very tall slim ones, make much sense. Such buildings cannot be built and occupied in phases as a low rise can, enabling the developer to respond and amend quickly to the dictats of the occupier market. They must be constructed all in one go, or mothballed if the letting market collapses or the money runs out. Not only are such buildings very expensive to build, they are very expensive to operate. All the services have to be capable of operating reliably at great heights (most of all the lifts, of course, but also water and sewage and power). And of course the higher the building, the more space the services take up – tall slim buildings are notoriously inefficient in terms of the amount of space devoted to the services for the building, rather than to lettable or saleable space. In a low rise building the ratio of occupiable space may be over 80% of the total floor-space of the building; in a seventy storey tower it can be 60%, or even less.
This would not matter if occupiers would pay more to live or work at higher levels, and to some extent they will; but generally not enough to make the extra costs justify the tower. So the only economic justification is shortage of land. In Hong Kong or Manhattan, with a very tight supply of building land, high land values, and a very strong desire by businesses to be there, it makes sense to build upwards. There is nowhere else. That does not really apply in Dubai and the Gulf States, nor in large parts of the USA, and yet even there the steel and glass lightning rods reach ever higher. Vanity, vanity, often seems to be the real driver of height, greased by the naming rights for the building.
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, much of the City of London was destroyed, creating the largest urban regeneration site in Europe. It was an opportunity that a number of gentlemen of the time were quick to recognise and various plans were put forward as to how to build a new and much grander London, (though, as might well be imagined, most of the existing land owners preferred to go back to what had been there before the events that began in Pudding Lane). The government of Charles II appointed Sir Christopher Wren to consider how a new City of London might arise. Wren produced a plan for what would have been a great classical city, built of brick and stone (no polyurethane aluminium compounds then) punctuated by magnificent individual buildings, with harmony, massing and rhythm to the long straight avenues crossing the City to meet at geometrically perfect intersections.
It never got built, of course. It was one thing to set out perfect visions on paper, completely another to override property rights and impose conformity on a rising capitalistic free society. In the end St Paul’s Cathedral was to be Wren’s great memorial and the hint as to how he might have remade London. But one thing he and his assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor, were able to drive through was a programme of church building, not just in the City where many of the medieval churches had followed St Paul’s into smoke and ashes, but also in the new suburbs appearing on the eastern fringe of the City; Spitalfields, Wapping, Limehouse. What both architects insisted on was that whilst the new and rebuilt streets were inevitably in cheap brick, the churches should be of best white stone; that they should be appreciably higher than the streets around them; and that they must be topped by dramatic white towers and spires which would dominate the cityscape and proclaim the Protestant Whiggish ascendancy.
Though the intended fifty new churches, paid for by a London coal tax, ended up as only twelve, their dominant nature prevailed, and continued to do so for getting on for two hundred years. Then, increasing wealth, the ever rising value of land and the need for more inner city space started to force buildings higher – always limited of course by how many steps human legs could endure to reach a place to live or to work. The white – by now brown stained, black encrusted white – bodies of the churches gradually vanished behind the new generation of buildings, faster still after the development of safe lifts which eased the height restrictions.
Now the City churches are mere footstools to the great towers around them, albeit footstools with great stone needles marking out that these are special places. But in the East End the three remaining Hawksmoor churches still dominate the world around them, remarking that this once was a Christian world, indeed that these remain islands of worship in a diverse and mostly secular society.
Now London is truly in the age of the towers, a twenty first century version of medieval Bologna (which had around 180 towers). Some 260 are built or approved for London, a number which will radically change the roofscapes. It is nothing compared with many growing cities of the Middle East, the Far East and of the USA and London’s towers are mostly much shorter than theirs. But if Wren and Hawksmoor were marking the dominant Protestant settlement which enfolded English society in the seventeenth century, it is interesting to consider what our worldwide descendants may consider the early twenty first century was up to in reaching so ambitiously and expensively for the heavens. Praising money and wealth? A contest of societies, the rising East marking its new hegemony against the struggling West? The ultimate struggle of capitalists, challenging each other in glass and steel? Let us not forget that JRR Tolkien’s evil wizards ended up marooned on top of their monstrous towers, surrounded by fire and flood; maybe it is time to bring ourselves back closer to earth and to a greater humility.
