When Frank Lloyd Wright sketched out his Mile High Skyscraper in 1956, it was four times taller than the Empire State Building, the tallest building at the time. Such was Wright’s faith in the technologies of modernity – foremost among them, steel frame construction and elevators – that he naturally presumed the challenges of this extreme height could be overcome.
Almost 60 years of failure later, Wright’s dream looks finally to be realised – almost. Plans for the Kingdom Tower, a mile-high skyscraper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, were recently scaled back to a mere 1km due to “unsuitable geology”. Nevertheless, today’s construction technology and engineering are edging ever higher, enabling a new generation of so-called “super-tall” skyscrapers. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest, stands at an impressive 829m.
But what of the lifts? Halfway up the Shard, London’s tallest skyscraper, you are asked to step out of the elevator in order to switch to another. This is called the transfer floor or “sky lobby”, a necessary inconvenience in order to reach the upper half of the building, and a symptom of the limits of elevators today. It can also be seen as evidence of the centuries-old arms race between architecture and technology.
The Shard is only 306m tall, and one still has to change elevators to reach the top. To ascend a mile-high (1.6km) tower using the same technology could necessitate changing elevators as many as 10 times. Waiting around on that many transfer floors may take the shine off your penthouse suite. But transfer floors are not merely inconvenient, they also take up valuable floor space that can’t be let. Too much unlettable space and your super-tall skyscraper won’t stack up financially.
Enter the UltraRope, a new kind of lift cable developed by Finnish elevator company Kone. Eschewing woven steel cable in favour of carbon fibre, the UltraRope is described as “lift-hoisting technology” – a bit of a mouthful, and a sign that we don’t yet have the right words for this cable-that’s-not-really-a-cable. Strong and lightweight, the UltraRope will supposedly allow lifts to travel up to 1km in a single run, double what’s currently possible with a steel cable. It’s the weight that’s the real innovation here: as lift cables get longer, the weight of cable itself can account for far more than the car and its passengers, requiring impractically huge machines to operate it. The UltraRope is 90% lighter than the equivalent steel cable, thereby reducing the load and enabling far taller continuous runs.
I have a piece of it on my desk. It’s a peculiar object, very stiff – you almost think they should have called it UltraStick – and black. Looking closely, you can see it’s comprised of four carbon-fibre cores, each roughly 5x3mm, encased in a high-friction coating of clear resin. When installed for real, multiple strands of UltraRope are used to hoist each elevator car, operating in parallel to share the load. The UltraRope is a peculiar and unusual contemporary object, the product of technological refinement and materials science.
We have recently acquired some sections of UltraRope for the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of our “rapid response collecting” strategy. As the name suggests, this is about bringing objects quickly into the museum in response to current events. We have recently opened a display featuring the first 13 such objects, including a 3D printed handgun, shoes designed in different shades of “nude” and a pair of false eyelashes endorsed by Katy Perry. Each object is implicated in a larger narrative, and points toward a possible future; the UltraRope sits alongside them as a signal toward the vertical future of our cities.
The UltraRope is merely the latest in a long chain of innovations, stretching back centuries, which together form the composite technology we have come to know as the elevator. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas dedicated a room to this history in the Elements exhibition at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Koolhaas describes the elevator as “the product of technological alchemy: a fusion of several boring existing innovations which had a dramatic impact on the shape of our cities and the shape of our bodies alike”.
Evidence of basic hoists used to extract material from mines can be found in prehistoric sites across Europe. The ancient Greeks and Romans created mechanical platforms as devices for scenography in theatres. But the key technologies that comprise the “modern” elevator – woven cable, safety brake, electric motor, core, traction and elevator bank – were all defined in the second half of the 19th century, in a period of great urban and technological transformation.
The invention of the elevator depends on external innovations, too. Steel construction, as pioneered by Louis Sullivan in Chicago in the 1880s, freed buildings from their dependence on compressive structures, allowing them to go higher still. Breakthroughs in fire safety and sprinkler systems enabled buildings to legally outstretch the height of a fireman’s ladder. James Gleick, in The Information (2011), points to an even more oblique technology: the telephone. Gleick cites telephone engineer John J Carty, who wrote in 1908: “Take any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.”
The impact these various tools, technologies and techniques had on the shape of cities was immediate. In one city in particular, Manhattan, where the new capacity of the elevator converged with real estate pressures and the egos of captains of industry, a new urban condition was born. The capacity of these buildings to concentrate a huge amount of floor space on a relatively small plot of land meant they became powerful tools of economic speculation. Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building, one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers, completed in 1913, coined the pithy phrase “a skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay”. But this wasn’t always the case. The infamous “skyscraper index” purports to predict economic crises in the wake of frenzied construction of tall buildings, a sign the market is overheating. Indeed, even the Empire State Building – icon of American capitalism – only found enough tenants to become profitable in 1950, almost 20 years after its completion.
Despite the elevator’s birth in “technological alchemy”, as Koolhaas describes it, our cultural demand for a singular author points to Elisha Otis’s entrepreneurial performance at the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York. To a gathered crowd of onlookers, Otis ascended into the air on his platform, then, at the apogee, had an assistant cut the rope with a dagger. Gasps were heard as the onlookers expected disaster, but the platform barely fell an inch, saved by Otis’s patented safety catch. This anticlimax has become the elevator’s origin myth. But as Andreas Bernard exposes in Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator (2014), this story of invention is itself an invention, promoted and cemented in place by the Otis company throughout the 20th century. Elisha Otis’s daring performance barely garners a footnote in the newspapers of 1853, and the heroic and now “official” illustration of the performance was in fact drawn in 1978. Bernard concludes: “The teeming, astonished onlookers as well as the assistant who has just severed the suspension cable are inventions of the recent past.” Despite this attempt to claim recognition, the elevator remains an anonymous product of a collaboration between various inventors, many of whom could not have known each other.
In an alternate world, where these dispersed inventions weren’t brought together in sequence to form the elevator, what might life be like? The Torre David, a 47-storey tower in Caracas, Venezuela, is occupied by squatters up to the 28th floor, without the aid of an elevator. The building is home to more than 3,000 people, standing as a potent sign of resistance in a city of great disparity of wealth and equality.
Design critic Justin McGuirk spent five days in the tower for his new book Radical Cities. McGuirk describes life in the tower as “urban alpinism”: a constant struggle against gravity and the tedium of the endless stairwell. Despite this extreme inconvenience, the residents have developed their own strategies to cope. Using the ramp of an adjacent carpark building, goods can be driven a quarter of the way up on motorcycles. And small bodega convenience stores have appeared every two floors or so, selling essentials such as tinned food, pasta and toilet paper. McGuirk writes: “Only the invention of the elevator made skyscrapers possible, and so a skyscraper without one is, theoretically speaking, a useless typology.” And yet, the hybrid vertical village of the Torre David illustrates an alternative, “an urban laboratory for how cities might work differently”.
The police finally cracked down on the squatters, evicting the residents and relocating them out of central Caracas. This episode highlights the real reason for the skyscraper: density. Faced with the alternative of living in the barrios that surround the city, these people had chosen to inhabit a centrally located tower without lifts. The vertical inconvenience of taking the stairs outweighed the horizontal inconvenience of living on the city’s fringe. It goes to show how the capacity to build higher, and to concentrate more people in a smaller area, can enhance all of the benefits of urban living – employment, social networks, services, entertainment. The UltraRope, and other advances in building technologies like it, enable this urban density to be realised. Frank Lloyd Wright’s seemingly impossible dream of a Mile High Tower could just be the answer for our cities after all.
Dr Rory Hyde is the curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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