Skyscrapers as spaceships: the "rampant individualism" and surprising environmentalism of really tall buildings.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns

AMERICA'S FIRST spaceships were lumbering beasts made of iron, steel, and fireproof terra cotta. One of the earliest prototypes was manufactured in Chicago in 1885. It had no engine and remained firmly rooted to Earth for all of its 46-year existence. But this trailblazer allowed its occupants to spend long stretches of their day at the dizzying, almost incomprehensible height of 138 feet, and in 1885 that qualified as space travel. It was the 10-Story Home Insurance Building, often described as the world's first skyscraper. (Though purists insist that its lack of a complete steel frame, a primary characteristic of skyscrapers, invalidates that claim.)

In the late 19th century, as ever-taller buildings began to lift man closer to the heavens in Chicago, New York, and other American cities, they inspired awe, envy, and, of course, regulatory efforts to impede their development. As Keith D. Revell, a professor of public administration at Florida International University, notes in an essay that appears in the 2005 anthology The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (Cambridge University Press), early skyscrapers were charged with "rampant individualism," "robb[ing] pedestrians of light and air," and even threatening public health by "blocking the salubrious rays of the sun." In 1891 Boston outlawed buildings greater than 125 feet in height. In 1904 Baltimore set the limit of architectural aspiration to a measly 70 feet.

The country's most avid architects and industrialists eventually overcame such restrictions, but only at great cost. As Revell recounts in his essay and his 2002 book Building Gotham (Johns Hopkins University Press), early city planning advocates used the threat of looming skyscrapers to enact New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution, landmark legislation that dramatically expanded the city's power to privilege broader community goals over individual property rights. The ordinance divided the metropolis into three use districts ("residence," "business," and "unrestricted") and five height zones, and normalized the idea that city bureaucrats had the legal authority to closely regulate the design, placement, size, and usage of all types of buildings in the city, not just skyscrapers.

Indeed, perhaps the only thing in 20th century New York that grew faster than its skyscrapers--which were governed by no fixed maximum height limit as long as they observed "setback" rules designed to reduce the shadows they cast on their environs--was...