Kissing The Sky

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Anybody who rides the elevator in an office or apartment building knows how true that is. So the interior space of the tall tower is lately subject to a complete reimagining. The most famous answer from Koolhaas has been his cantilevered proposal for the CCTV tower, headquarters of China's government television operation in Beijing. It's a building that somersaults over itself to provide the maximum space in which people can connect with one another. This year United Architects, an alliance of several architectural offices, entered a no less astonishing submission in a competition to design the Frankfurt, Germany, headquarters of the European Central Bank — an undulating sphere, 504 ft. high. Although it wasn't the winner, it made plain the radical direction in which things are moving.

The competition for the World Trade Center site, held in 2002, also made people aware, as never before, of how quickly architects are moving the skyscraper into uncharted territory. United Architects entered a widely seen proposal in the competition, an ensemble of five slightly inebriate towers. Some of them rise on the diagonal, and all of them eventually lean into one another and touch at their 60th floors. At that juncture they produce their most spectacular feature, a five-story corridor spanning the length of all five towers horizontally, making a fully enclosed loggia hundreds of feet long — a city street in midair.

"Tall buildings are turning into urban fabrics," says Greg Lynn of FORM, one of the members of United Architects. "Architects are thinking about how to pull the qualities of the street into the building." The United Architects design was too massive and audacious to have any real hope of winning the competition. And to a public looking for stability after Sept. 11, it was also too tilted. But the firm's ideas about the ways public space can be brought inside a tall building were very much, well, in the air. One of the most talked about skyscrapers of the past year, Norman Foster's 30 St. Mary Axe building in London — better known as "the gherkin" because of its shape — is a glass-enclosed vertical torpedo with sizable interior light wells and gardens scattered throughout its circular floor plates. Those permit each floor to communicate visually with others. "We can compose completely different organizational structures in terms of how you move through a building vertically," says Thom Mayne, of the forward-looking firm Morphosis, based in Santa Monica, Calif. "It would be much more like how you would move through a city horizontally. We can make buildings with streets, walks and piazzas inside."

"A tower is a spiritual quest," says Libeskind. "Whether it's San Gimignano or the Freedom Tower, it's about the ancient poetic desire to reach the sky." And even sometimes to reach it by pretzeled means. Twelve years ago, the very visionary architect Peter Eisenman was commissioned to design a showcase building for the recently unified Berlin, a combination of offices and hotel and retail space to be called the Max Reinhardt Haus, after the also very visionary German theater producer. For inspiration, Eisenman turned to nothing less than the Mbius strip, the 3-D geometric form produced by a single twisted surface. Had it been completed, his 34-story tower would have folded, buckled, twisted and gazed in on itself.