A new slant on tall stories

Although the wisdom of building colossal skyscrapers came under intense scrutiny after the swift destruction of the World Trade Center almost three years ago, architects and engineers are busy devising ever bolder and more dizzying high-rise towers for locations around the globe.

Enhanced safety features, structural soundness and environmental sustainability are key elements of the latest generation of tall buildings showcased in a survey of exhilarating new design on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens. The exhibition spotlights 25 projects, many with astounding sculptural forms that are far more ambitious and complex than the traditional repeating pattern of floors arrayed to form a monumental stack.

Look across the galleries at MoMA and the large-scale models of the new skyscrapers -- some as tall as 14 feet -- appear to form a dazzling cityscape of their own. What’s not immediately apparent in this show is how architects have responded to new anxieties in the post-9/11 world.

Now that iconic landmarks may prove tempting bull’s-eye targets for terrorism, it’s not enough for them to stand tall as embodiments of civic will. Architects are also making certain to provide improved means of entry and exit, enhanced escape routes, filters for biological and chemical weapons, as well as areas of refuge with extra blast or fire resistance in the event of disaster.

In New York, the relatives of firefighters and others who died in the tower attacks have formed a Skyscraper Safety Campaign to improve security and zoning code compliance in any future high-rises. David Childs, lead architect of the 1,776-foot high Freedom Tower, has been at pains to defend the state-of-the-art safety features of that mammoth project to be built at ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

But Childs’ design, carried out in collaboration with architect Daniel Libeskind, is conspicuously absent from the exhibition, the curators opting instead to include three unsuccessful competition entries for the World Trade Center site that they consider to be more aesthetically groundbreaking -- those of British architect Norman Foster, a team including United Architects and Greg Lynn, and a collaborative effort involving Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl.

In contrast to the now-vanished twin towers, which were essentially two columns of uniform floor plates extending upward, the designs on view at MoMA include several vertiginous sculptural forms previously unseen on any urban skyline. Curated by Terence Riley, who heads the museum’s department of architecture, together with structural engineer and Princeton University professor Guy Nordenson, the exhibition “Tall Buildings” includes works designed from 1988 through the present.

“After 9/11 people couldn’t look at a tall building without cringing,” Riley says by telephone. But he believes that moment has passed: “This was confirmed when I saw the first ‘Spider-Man’ movie, with the kind of glorious role that skyscrapers were given in that show. Somehow something had happened. Not only I, but the public in general was willing to think of them in a positive way. It was a sign that New Yorkers were much more willing to say, ‘Skyscrapers are our legacy, and while we might have to be careful about what we do next, this is part and parcel of our patrimony.’ ”

Judging from the dozen plans created after Sept. 11, 2001 -- several of which are under construction or soon to be realized -- there appears to be little sign of caution or reluctance to pursue the heavenwards striving that dates as far back as Babel. And nowadays, Riley says, skyscraper designers are no longer content to just barrel upward.

“Let’s face it, the race to be the tallest building on Earth has gotten a bit banal,” he says. “Instead, many of the newer skyscrapers frame and create space in ways that tall buildings never did.”

Take, for example, Rem Koolhaas’ Central Chinese Television Tower in Beijing, a soaring loop of interconnected L-shapes that the architect sees as underlining the “chain of interdependence” linking staffers at the state broadcast company. Koolhaas, whose Office for Metropolitan Architecture is based in the Netherlands, is the latest in a series of Western designers commissioned to draw up potent architectural landmarks in China.

After the collapse in May of Paul Andreu’s sleek new terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, Chinese authorities have voiced ongoing confidence in the structural viability of Andreu’s new domed Beijing Opera House, which has been likened to a phosphorescent jellyfish.

But the triumphal design that Koolhaas has created for Chinese television looks sure to elicit its own brand of uncertainty in potential visitors and occupants. Working with Ove Arup & Partners engineers, Koolhaas has drawn up a sharply edged mega-structure with an anxiety-inducing cantilevered overhang, said to be earthquake-proof. Diagonal bracing, or truss-like skins for the building’s exterior, along with increasingly sophisticated computer analysis of stress zones throughout the structure, help make such forms possible.

Koolhaas has come under fire for putting such technical wizardry at the service of China’s one-party government. “It is hard to imagine a cool European architect in the 1970s building a television station for Gen. Pinochet without losing a great deal of street cred,” Ian Buruma wrote in the Guardian newspaper. Yet it’s unclear that the project will ever get off the drawing board. Just days after the MoMA exhibition opened, a Chinese magazine affiliated with the official Xinhua news agency reported the $600-million project had been shelved -- not for safety concerns, but economic reasons.

Riley believes some variant of Koolhaas’ design eventually will be realized somewhere. “The really groundbreaking proposals don’t get built, but some downstream version does,” he says. “The visionary proposal probably can’t be built because it’s beyond what everybody wants. But it excites people.”

In more neutral Malmo, Sweden, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava does his own variant of the twist with a torqued tower projected for completion in 2005. The skyscraper by Calatrava, who is also an engineer, appears to rotate as it rises with the support of huge steel trusses on the facade.

Another design on view, a 2,000-foot tower designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for Chicago resembles a gargantuan hypodermic needle. Using technology drawn from aerospace, it features new types of dampers to help reduce high-wind vibrations disturbing to occupants of upper floors.

Architectural trends are as globalized as anything else these days, and most of the plans displayed at MoMA make scant if any reference to their varied locales, though a few make nods in that direction. The decorative form of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s 88-story Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, with its shimmering crenelated crown, recalls a Chinese pagoda, and with it the now dated, postmodern towers that dot many U.S. downtown skylines. In a less overt acknowledgment of local tradition, the monolithic Arcos Bosques Corporativo in Mexico City, designed by Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon, has a concrete facade that evokes ancient Mayan construction.

In Britain, Renzo Piano has proposed the 66-story London Bridge Tower, an exceedingly slender pyramid whose elongated crystalline form, according to a note by curators on an exhibition label, refers to the spires of the city’s churches and the masts of tall sailing ships that once docked along the Thames River.

Slated for completion in 2009, Piano’s building will stand not far from Norman Foster’s newly completed Swiss Re headquarters, the phallic 40-floor high-rise that Londoners have nick- named “the Gherkin.” London municipal authorities have been openly promoting these innovative and attention-getting new designs in a bid to dramatically transform the skyline of the British capital.

Not everyone welcomes the idea of London becoming a hothouse for skyscraper innovation, and some fear that the new towers could harm the city’s historic urban fabric and identity. “London seems to be turning into an Absurdist picnic table,” Prince Charles commented derisively in reference about the London Bridge Tower design. “We already have a giant gherkin in the city. Now it looks as if we are going to have an enormous saltcellar as well.”

“Tall Buildings” remains on view at MoMA’s temporary quarters in Queens through Sept. 27.