STOOPING TO CONQUER: In this computer rendering of a proposed office park in Milan, Italy, Libeskinds curving tower is flanked by Hadids torqued flourish on the left and Isozakis slim wafer
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Sculptural would be a good way to describe Gehry's work too. If all goes as planned, ground will be broken next year in lower Manhattan for what will be by far the tallest building of his long career, a residential tower rising as much as 800 ft. (about 75 stories). Though the design is still incomplete, Gehry expects it will feature some vertical adaptation of his trademark curves and arabesques. Not too many years ago, those features would have given pause to the structural engineers assigned to make sure buildings stand up even when they rise along irregular lines. In the late '80s, Gehry proposed a design for a new Madison Square Garden in Manhattan — which was never built — with an office tower in the shape of a vertical fish. "The construction people said you couldn't do it," he recalls. "But since then it's become easy to do forms that have that much curvature and complexity. It's normal now."
It's normal because architects are working more closely with engineers, bringing them in at the very start of the design process to assure the stability of their daredevil schemes and superhigh altitudes. "As the buildings get taller and taller, you really need the input of the structural engineer at the beginning," says Ysrael Seinuk, whose firm, Cantor-Seinuk, is the structural engineer for the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site. Towers have got not just taller but stranger — asymmetrical and askew. No need to worry though, says Charles Thornton of Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers, which worked on a new tower in Taipei, among many others. "Two new developments allow us to produce any shape anyone wants to do," he says. "One is the ability to 'build' a building on the computer with programs that even factor in the dimension of time. We can see how components react to stress over the years, so that building doesn't go out of plumb." The second is that with computers, engineers and architects can also produce accurate three-dimensional designs, then a 3-D model, which is easier for subcontractors to follow accurately than the old two-dimensional blueprints or specs. "We give that to the fabricators, the steel erector, the exterior wall faade supplier," says Thornton. "The 3D model makes for less error in the construction phase."
No matter what the exterior looks like, the skyscraper can be a problematic building — isolated, aloof from its neighbors and boring inside, a pancake stack of identical floor plates with a lobby at the bottom and maybe a restaurant at the top. For years now, Rem Koolhaas, the oracular Dutch architect and urban theorist, has conducted an unrelenting rhetorical campaign against the skyscraper. "The promise it once held," he wrote recently, "has been negated by repetitive banality [and] carefully spaced isolation."