Skyscrapers: From Here to Eternity : The Race Is On to Erect the Nation’s Tallest Building, but Is a Mile-High : High-Rise Functional--or Even Plausible?

Just how high will ego, engineering, artistry and profit-seeking take them?

In Los Angeles, New York developer Donald Trump says he wants to build a 125-story office tower on the Ambassador Hotel site.

In Manhattan, Trump has designs for a 150-story, 1,670-foot tower titled “Television City” on the Hudson River.

In Chicago, where the skyscraper originated in the 1880s, developers Miglin-Beitler are planning a 1,994-foot pinnacled shaft dubbed the “Skyneedle,” designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli.

And no sooner had Pelli staked his claim as the architect of the world’s highest building than Chicago designer Helmut Jahn topped it with drawings for a Michigan Avenue tower two stories taller.

In Houston, a team at Rice University devised a theoretical model in 1983 for a skyscraper thrusting 500 stories--a mile high--into the air.

The race to put up the world’s tallest building clearly has resumed anew nationwide with a rash of super skyscrapers in the works, all of which would dwarf the world’s current record-holder: Chicago’s 110-story, 1,454-foot Sears Tower.

After the Sears Tower was completed in 1974, there was a pause in the upward thrust of commercial high-rises as designers seemed to reach a limit of function and plausibility in the contest to throw up towers taller than their competitors.

There also then was a feeling of respect among many progressive urban designers and developers to preserve and protect the humane scale of the city at street level.

So why now, in the 1990s, are designers, developers and engineers pressing skyward again?

The “new wave of super skyscrapers represents a renaissance of faith in our cities,” contends Pelli, who has designed a host of high-rises nationwide, including the 53-story 777 Tower in Los Angeles on Figueroa Street, which is now under construction. “After a period of hesitancy, when our civic confidence seemed to falter, we’re once again glorying in our technical and financial expertise.”

Tall buildings play a prominent role in defining the urban skyline, Pelli said, adding, “They shape the silhouettes of our social and economic culture at its proudest.”

But not everyone is as gung-ho as Pelli, Jahn and Trump about the super skyscraper rage.

“The race to build the world’s tallest tower had been long since, we’d thought, abandoned, and with good reason,” sniffed Progressive Architecture magazine. “A 150-story spire is . . . urbanistically inappropriate and environmentally inhumane.”

Such complaints, however, cannot curb the threefold thrust fueling the present super skyscraper push, the same combination of forces that birthed the skyscraper as a totally new type of architecture in the late 19th Century:

* Soaring land prices.

* Technological advances in construction.

* And the corporate desire to make a distinctive mark on a burgeoning urban skyline.

“The tall commercial building arose from the pressure of land prices, the land prices from the pressure of population,” wrote Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, one of the late-Victorian inventors of the skyscraper style.

Today, however, the cost of land has rocketed to new, unbelievable heights in metropolises worldwide. They have topped $20,000 a square foot in Tokyo. In Manhattan and Chicago, downtown lots go for upwards of $2,000 a square foot. In Los Angeles, prime commercial sites command prices of roughly $1,000 a square foot.

But in Sullivan’s time, as in ours, the urge to surge skyward transcends mere economic pressures.

It is driven, in part, by aesthetic and technological aspirations.

In his famed, 1896 essay, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Sullivan, for example, celebrated the skyscraper--an archetypally American invention--as “a proud and soaring thing.”

With fellow architects at the Chicago firms of Holabird & Roche and Burnham & Roots, Sullivan elongated the classical architectural orders of base, middle and cap to create towers that he felt should never be “merely earthbound.”

Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, in her book, “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered,” wrote: “The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet. The skyscraper, that unique celebration of secular capitalism and its values, challenges us at every level.”

To meet these symbolic, financial and sociopolitical challenges, engineers have developed advanced structural steel frames--calculated by computer and tested as models in wind tunnels--that enable them to design towers hundreds of stories high.

In 1983, “The Engineering News-Record,” a professional publication, reported that Chicago architect Harry Weese and New York engineer Lev Zitlin had devised a 210-story structure using a twisted shaft design stayed by guy wires.

At the same time, engineer Hal Iyengar of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was designing a 200-story “super frame” high-rise using an elaborate form of telescoped truss.

Solutions for building earthquake-resistant skyscrapers also grew more sophisticated in the 1980s.

There were developments and refinements, for example, in floating, raft-type foundations that allow high-rises a controlled rocking motion. Engineers tinkered with dual-frame systems that combine rigid cores with lighter perimeter columns, permitting a modern tower to roll with the punches.

Discussing the relatively modest, 73-story First Interstate World Center in downtown Los Angeles--now the West Coast’s tallest tower--engineer Douglas E. Gordon explained: “The structural frame for a building this tall in a seismic zone demands a balance between stiffness, so that the building does not sway during high winds, and ductility, to ensure energy absorption capacity during an earthquake.”

The quake codes in Los Angeles, the nation’s most demanding, require high-rises to be able to withstand the jolt of the expected Big One, which could register up to 8.3, a level many times more violent than the tremors that shattered the Bay Area last year.

But it is not a quake and the possibility of super skyscraper collapses that most concerns architects and government officials. It is the danger of the buildings becoming “towering infernoes.”

The blaze that gutted parts of the First Interstate tower on Wilshire Boulevard in May, 1988, revealed that the city’s firefighting services could be stretched beyond capacity, if a major quake hit and generated a host of simultaneous high-rise fires. “Our capacity came close to disaster,” a senior Los Angeles City Fire Department official said privately. “If several First Interstates happened at once, we’d be burned to the ground. People trapped in tall buildings could perish in the hundreds, maybe thousands.”

Besides fire fears, the super skyscrapers also raise lofty concerns about how the structures might affect air traffic.

Chicago’s “Skyneedle,” for example, would come within six feet of violating current regulations set by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has barred buildings from exceeding 2,000 feet in height because they might become a hazard to traffic in the nation’s already, increasingly crowded airspace.

But urban designers object to super skyscrapers for reasons other than public safety, reasons that concern the character and definition of the modern metropolis.

“To create taller and taller buildings in a city with many centers like Los Angeles makes no sense,” argues Hollywood architect Barton Myers. “It’s simply an expression of corporate ego that overwhelms our skyline and our service systems.”

Besides, Myers adds, super skyscrapers are “extremely expensive to construct.”

Pelli agrees that 125- to 150-story structures cost about 30% more per square foot to build than towers half that height. But he points out that rents in the top floors of the super spires can command double the prices of mere skyscrapers.

“Everybody wants to be at the top of the world,” he says. “It’s a natural human urge to want to look down upon everyone else.”

Pelli cautions that super skyscrapers must be carefully designed and located. They must read as “icons on the urban skyline, symbols that serve more than the owner’s personal prestige.”

Commenting on Trump’s Los Angeles ambitions (which still face a formidable barrage of official proceedings, including a possible battle with the Los Angeles Board of Education, which wants the Ambassador site for a high school) Pelli said bluntly: “This is crazy. Crazy to construct a very tall building far from freeways or any adequate mass transit systems capable of moving thousands of people in and out efficiently.

“Crazy above all to destroy the scale of a prime and historic section of Wilshire Boulevard for the sake of one man’s self-glorification.”