In light of the panic Dubai sent through the markets late last year and the completion of the Burj Khalifah this month, I recalled the fascinating UK Guardian article about the work of analyst Andrew Lawrence. Lawrence created the “Skyscraper index.”

the construction of super-tall buildings is often a sign that an economic downturn is on the way. The best example is the late 1920s, which saw an unprecedented skyscraper boom prior to the Great Depression. The Empire State Building, which was finished in 1929, didn’t achieve full occupancy for 40 years.”

In short, skyscrapers are “the physical embodiment of ‘irrational exuberance’ in the markets.” Interesting… But I found myself asking: why skyscrapers?

Around the time that Dubai was asking for a reprieve from debt payments, I was reading American Technological Sublime, in which David Nye asks the same intriguing questions: why does New York have skyscrapers? Did they build them just because they could?

There are a couple of hypotheses. The first is financial, that skyscrapers were “a logical economic development forced into existence by rapid growth.” The second is technological: “the availability of new materials and technologies” pushed the construction of huge new buildings.

Nye finds some evidence for the latter. The development of structural steel made constructing buildings like the Empire State Building possible and electricity made spending time in them desirable. But the technologies “did not call the skyscraper into being, even if they did facilitate upward expansion.”

What did “call them into being,” then?

The earliest very tall buildings were completed by newspapers fighting with each other to sell papers. “In 1875 the New York Tribune completed the city’s tallest structure (260 feet),” Nye writes. “The Observer and the Herald almost immediately built tall office buildings of their own. In 1889 Joseph Pulitzer’s World erected a building of 16 stories, then six more than any other.”

The newspaper bubble buildings were quickly surpassed. Woolworth paid $13.5 million in cash for his building, knowing full-well that he’d never make money on the investment. As his contractor relates it, though, Woolworth had other motives.

“Mr. Woolworth let me into his secret—that there would be an enormous hidden profit outweighing any loss. He confessed that the Woolworth Building was going to be a giant sign-board to advertise around the world his spreading chain of five-and-ten-cent stores.”

So, the desire for advertising and spectacle clearly played a role in the calculations of early skyscraper builders. That much is obvious from the showpiece quality of many of Dubai’s buildings, too.

But we can go deeper: why do people like skyscrapers? Where did the brand-building power of these buildings come from? Why did people like them? Because they clearly did (and do). Thousands would show up for the “lighting” of the building, which was usually accomplished by a sitting U.S. President through a telegraph wire.

Skyscrapers hold human fascination precisely because they, as Roland Barthes would have it, provide “contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space…”

Simmering inside the newly motorized, newly electrified city, the residents were coming to realize that nature, as their parents had known it, was lost to them. In ways that could scarcely have been imagined forty years before, they were living in an overwhelmingly manmade world.  The skyline was “a completely man-made substitute for the geology of mountains, cliffs, and canyons.”

These people — immigrants, Yankees, riff-raff, burghers, freed slaves alike — needed a new symbol for the good life. How were they to live in what was really, physically a new world, without the old signposts and guides?

Buildings like Woolworth’s became the symbol of a new moral order based on money, not religious adherence or local custom. The best rose literally closest to heaven. “Just as churches had raised the highest towers of the traditional city, each corporation now raised its skyscraper,” Nye writes. It’s no surprise that the Woolworth Building was immediately nicknamed the “Cathedral of Commerce.”

In a famous 1630 speech, echoed and re-echoed through American history all the way to Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill.” Winthrop himself was recalling the gospel Matthew in which Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

In a 1909 speech, the New York mayor described his town as a new kind of model city, “the huge masses of its office buildings, towering peak on peak and pinnacle above pinnacle to the sky, making of lower Manhattan, to the eye at least, a city that is set on a hill.” Skyscrapers formed not just the city on the hill, but the hill itself!

What’s amazing here is that the new moral monument is completely manmade, unmoored from even the basic physical reality of topography: the only thing that determines the holiness of the place, the cathedral is the ability of its owner to spend money!

The skyscraper is a monument to power and the money-makes-right moral triumph of the people who built it. And in an ascendant America, though the richest might have financed the construction, all who were living in the country could share in the pleasure of knowing that it was Americans who were able to spend the most money. Our rich could beat up their rich. In the salad days of Dubai, the same financial force was on display.

So, what’s the link between the skyscrapers and irrational exuberance? When people are making crazy money, it becomes difficult to justify the windfall. He who is raking in the most money has to secure the moral right to have it.

Enter the skyscraper. It doesn’t just advertise, it sanctifies. And that’s an expensive operation.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.