11/13/2022 0 Comments Skyscraper meaning![]() But the name stuck, and initially any building that towered high over the surrounding structures was dubbed a skyscraper. The world’s first skyscraper was completed in 1885 in Chicago and it stood only 138 feet tall, a mere 10 stories that would not even count as a skyscraper today. But skyscrapers have only been around for about 130 years. Skyscrapers grace our big cities with their bold presence and define our skylines with mighty buildings that literally seem to scrape the sky. Chicago Ave.Skyscrapers have become pretty commonplace in modern times, and National Skyscraper Day is our golden opportunity to appreciate these architectural marvels and feats of engineering. 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. "Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity," through Sept. They're small enough to suck on, but too large to fit comfortably in your mouth, and are available for 10 bucks a pop at the MCA Store. The one I got was green, which made me think of Cabrini-Green. But I did find one last irony to savor, though I almost missed it: Eliza Myrie's limited-edition hard candies, each shaped like a housing project. That might explain why the section after that, on "improvised urbanism," felt so anticlimactic, like a random catch-all for works that don't quite fit in elsewhere. Especially in light of Feldmann's piece, the irony was crushing. On the day I was there, the uppermost paper bore the Tribune's headline "6 killed in Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin." The photograph accompanying the article showed a vigil for the victims, a skyscraper barely visible in the background. In this way the "towers" rise and fall, again and again. When the stack reaches the top, the papers are recycled. The outlines of each column are slowly filled in as each day's newspaper is added to an ever-growing pile. Jonathan Horowitz's "Recycling Sculpture" consists of twin columns outlined with blue paint on a white wall. On the other side of Feldmann's installation is a piece that's smaller in scale and scope, but just as potentially impactful. Each paper comes from a different city across the globe, and each bears a version of the same image: the World Trade Center midcollapse. In some ways the horrific events of that day already hang, like Sosnowska's ruined fire escape, over every work of art in this exhibition, but those in the "Vulnerable Icons" section address it specifically, starting with Hans-Peter Feldmann's room of walls gridded with the front pages of newspapers dated Sept. Of course, it's impossible to talk about the fate of the modern skyscraper without also grappling with9/11. Verticality leads, perhaps inevitably, to the show's next theme, "Personification." Based on the selections here, our tendency to impart human qualities to tall buildings largely comes down to a room of semihumorous paintings and sculptures that mostly depict the skyscraper as a not-so-thinly disguised phallic symbol, though I'll admit I laughed at Vito Acconci's "High Rise," a kinetic sculpture whose internal armature can be folded up and down, like a giant Jacob's ladder toy, by way of a wheel-driven pulley system. Among numerous depictions of the skyscraper's upright vertical form - which a wall panel describes as "deeply familiar and satisfying to the human psyche" - you'll find several that also play up the skyscraper's associations with glamour and a certain jet-setting urban sophistication, the former through, for example, Chris Burden's gleaming, 101/2-foot tall, nickel-plated replica of the Chrysler Building made from toy construction parts, and the latter via photographer Roe Ethridge's sun-kissed image of a Tokyo skyscraper, itself shot from a neighboring high-rise. The Warhol film kicks off a larger section labeled "Engineering Verticality," the first of several thematic areas. ![]()
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