Includes index.

Includes index.

Bibliography: p.

"From Ada Louise Huxtable - America's most acclaimed architecture critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Prize Fellow - here is an energetic defense of cities and a brilliant consideration of the skyscraper as art, as business, as the product of politics and speculation. Despite the fact that the skyscraper has existed for a century, the question of how to design the tall building has never been resolved. In a vivid account of the search for a skyscraper style, Huxtable takes us from its pragmatic beginnings in the 1890s, when technology limited style, to the first decades of this century, when architects looked to the past for inspiration and created outsized cathedrals and châteaux, to the revolutionary simplicity at midcentury of the International Style's glass boxes, and on to the spectacularly varied towers of the present day. Drawing on over a hundred photographs, she shows us definitively why certain skyscrapers function as great architecture and others do not. Today, skyscrapers have become front page news, as in the case of Philip Johnson's controversial AT&T building in New York City or Michael Graves's Humana Corporation Headquarters in Louisville. In a characteristic swing of taste, architects have reacted to the stark geometry of the glass box with an explosion of new styles in New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and other cities across the country and around the world. But the recent boom in skyscraper construction, despite the creative forces it has unleashed, is a mixed blessing. As Huxtable makes clear in a devastating critique of many of the newest towers, the skyscraper may have overreached itself. If architects, developers, lawyers, and city planners continue to overlook the impact of tall buildings on the cities whose skylines they dominate, urban life threatens to become unbearable. No other critic manages as ably as Ada Louise Huxtable to write the history of the skyscraper or to probe its future. The Tall Building is a seminal work that will be discussed among people who care about cities for years to come." --,Dust Jacket.

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