Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human experience. Are we building a world where there is no “there” there? How will we know what we have lost?

Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. We will also consider together how these elements of place can be treated responsibly by architects, planners, designers, and others who shape the spaces where we spend our lives.

Click here to see an index of all of the pieces in the “Elements of Place” series. The discussions will also inform a Lab on the future of community development in May 2012.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So what would be your ideal vertical building, or perhaps the building that best expresses what’s possible in the vertical?

Mike Davis: There is something about the Chrysler Building in New York City that really accentuates that. A lot of the movement in the design of the building as it goes up is fairly vertical. The Empire State Building is like that too. I contrast that with some of the more modern skyscrapers that “read” some of the floor plates or lines, so it looks like a series of stacked floors. Even the Burj Khalifa has a series of lines that indicate where the floors are. That’s not to say that the Chrysler Building doesn’t, but the vertical is the main thing you notice as it tapers from something of a formal base to a slender middle to an even more slender, spire top. I think there is something about the design of buildings that get smaller as they get taller that connects with me. It’s not just the large rectangular shape with the flat top.

ABN: What building or buildings strike you as a waste of verticality, or a poor example of what buildings can do with vertical space?

MD: Well, we’ve talked before about governmental height limits, which can look really asinine. The ones in Phoenix, for example, don’t actually do anything to preserve the view of the mountains for pedestrians or the occupants of nearby buildings. It has just created a lot of stout, chubby, “premium” office space.

But when you think about it, there are many different ways to use vertical structures. You have things like the Space Needle in Seattle or the CN Tower in Toronto that are mainly “useful” as community icons.

I suppose I am ultimately a fan of vertical structures because I am a fan of density. I am a fan of being able to do a whole lot more with less space on the ground. But there is also a sense in which verticality has become static and wasteful. You have a cluster of mid-rise and high-rise buildings that are the norm of what a city is. We’ve become a little more clever over the years, but you wonder if it would be more interesting if we could find a way for buildings to pass around each other or over each other or away from each other instead of just getting taller every year.

I love those angular buildings of the Tyrell Corporation in ‘Blade Runner’, a fantastic Syd Mead composition. They are technically both horizontal and vertical at the same time being at 45 degrees. As an aside, Blade Runner occurs in 2019 Los Angeles. Think we will see anything like them in 7 years?

ABN: Maybe if you can get the financing.

Can you think of any places where the potential of verticality has been spoiled by architectural malfeasance?

MD: There was the great social experiment of the Sixties, high-rise residential housing, much of which has been torn down. I’m thinking of places like Cabrini Green in Chicago. They provided some nice views, but they ended up with so much criminality and stigma surrounding them that they were torn down. They were considered a bad experiment.

I don’t know that those problems were literally tied to the buildings’ verticality. But it does seem that we are attaining a greater degree of success with affordable housing when they are blended into the existing market in a more horizontal way. The idea that we would have these clusters of Stalinist, concrete buildings and then say, “You people live over there” – that was ultimately a monumental social failure, but the architecture didn’t help.

You look at some city skylines and you wonder if there will ever be a “completion” to the city. What happens if we don’t grow? If we jump forward to 2150, are we just going to have ever taller buildings in the same locations? And to what end, if there are not more people living in those particular places or communities? Will we always stack people in these filing cabinets called “office spaces?” Is that a permanent part of the human condition? Probably not. The idea of office space didn’t even really exist until about 100 years ago. It’s mainly that and residential space that define our high-rise buildings. We don’t go in for a lot of high-rise retail or high-rise industrial spaces.

ABN: I’m still stuck on your Cabrini Green example. I think everyone would agree that the destruction of those buildings and the rest of the high-rise public housing in Chicago was a powerful statement about the social and political landscape of the city. But it’s also an interesting symbolic event for architecture. We’ve destroyed plenty of vertical buildings in the past, but usually in the name of putting in a bigger, taller, even more vertical building.

MD: Sure – you think of the Las Vegas Strip, where they’ve torn down big hotels to build gargantuan ones.

ABN: Right. But the vertical buildings of public housing were demolished to undo a vertical paradigm. To me, it shows how strongly we feel culturally about types of buildings. I mean, if HUD came up with some radical new plan for public housing, if it looked liked the projects, people today would reject it.

In a way, it doesn’t matter what’s inside. If you build a building that looks like a church, there is a sense in which it is always going to be a church. Or on the other hand, there’s a church here in Johnson County, Kansas called the Church of the Resurrection that a lot of people think looks like a mall. I think that if it looks like a mall, there’s a sense in which it can’t help but be a mall.

Anyway, it makes me wonder what it meant for the architectural life of the City of Chicago to reject the vertical in such a visible way. It’s sort of like the decline of walled cities. Or perhaps it’s like the people who were suggesting after 9/11 that we would never build skyscrapers again.

MD: The significance of that target was intriguing. We’re told that in the end the target of Flight 93 was the Capitol, but I’ve read that in earlier versions of the plan they considered targeting the Sears Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid. On the one hand, targeting tall buildings like that lets the terrorists kill a large number of people. On the other hand, they probably would have had more victims if they had flown one of the planes into a football stadium on a Sunday. The iconic significance of the site mattered too.

But it’s a complicated significance. The World Trade Center wasn’t a public space or a well-known memorial like the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. If they had hit the Washington Monument, you could have just reconstructed it at 556 feet instead of 555 feet. But the World Trade Center site is also a piece of real estate. When they were beginning plans for reconstruction in 2003, there was a real issue of whether Manhattan actually needed 11 million additional square feet of office space. If we had really wanted to, we could have put a mile-high building there – but no one needed that much space and no one had $200 billion or however much it would cost.

You were trying to combine what had become a symbol of patriotism with some fairly pragmatic real estate principles. You also had the ethical or spiritual issue of how to build on a site where thousands of people had perished. Then there was the security issue – people initially talked about a structure with a concrete base thick enough to withstand a targeted nuclear blast. So what you ended up with was something of a compromise on top of a compromise on top of a compromise. I’m curious as to whether the Freedom Tower will ultimately fit the bill.

ABN: To me the most significant consequence of what you say is that even when a site has huge significance, there has to be some sort of economic logic and purpose behind committing the real estate and materials and manpower to a building that tall. There’s just no getting around it. We don’t just build these buildings for the heck of it – people have to use them.

MD: Dubai has obviously undergone a huge expansion of building and now has the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa. But I don’t know if that building has been considered a financial success or if it is merely symbolic. It may just exist so Tom Cruise can climb it in Mission Impossible.

Anyway, with a few exceptions, there are some truly garish and horrible buildings in Dubai. There’s one that looks like a styrofoam copy of the Chrysler Building, except they put two of them right next to each other. “Hey, if one is good, why not two?!” It’s hideous – there’s no elegance, detail, or proportion.

Fortunately the Burj Khalifa is an elegant exception. I doubt that its volume is much greater than the Sears Tower; that is, if the Sears Tower were made of clay, I think you could stretch it out into the Burj. But that’s an extra 1,000 feet into the air. It’s so slender that it’s not imposing. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the imposing nature of the Sears Tower – it represents a certain period of American confidence and development. But the Burj has another sort of elegance.

On the whole, though, this collection of buildings out in the sand is pretty cartoonish, not unlike Las Vegas. You have to wonder how much of it is simply wasted. These buildings are useless without a distribution system that connects them to people. That’s ultimately what I think is wrong with Dubai. There is a risk that we will be massively wasteful with verticality, particularly when we don’t even know whether we still need these environments to work in anymore. These buildings could end up as massively tall museums.

ABN: On that note, I think we should pivot to the horizontal.

MD: Right – from the World Trade Center to the Pentagon.

ABN: What do you think would be your ideal horizontal building?

MD: That’s harder. Honestly, the first thing I think of is the Bonneville Salt Flats. There’s no roof on it, but it’s a helluva race track. Then I think of the shopping mall, though I’m not particularly fond of it.

ABN: It’s a lot more difficult to think of beautiful, monumental horizontal buildings.

MD: There’s the distribution warehouse. Though even those are measured in both the vertical and the horizontal – the relevant measurement is the “CUB” or “clearance under beam.” I think the world’s tallest one-story buildings are the ones in which they assemble rockets and missiles, or the one where they prepared the space shuttle for launch.

ABN: I think that to find truly beautiful and monumental horizontal works you may have to go classical, or at least pre-modern.

MD: You have places like the Louvre or St. Peter’s in Rome. That’s another huge one-story building. But I actually think of the central square of the Vatican itself, St. Peter’s Square – that’s the truly beautiful horizontal space. Another one that is not enclosed is the Forbidden City in Beijing. Then there’s Red Square in Moscow, St. Mark’s in Venice – there’s a real impressiveness with those spaces. They seem kind of stark compared with the typical American park space with its tossed salad of trees and shrubbery. But these are the horizontal spaces that define cities. Central Park in New York is another one where the horizontal is given value by the startling absence of the vertical, though there are hills and tall trees and so forth.

Then there’s the ranch house or Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” house that came out of post-WWII American architecture. That was also an expression of the economic ideal of home ownership, as well as just having plenty of land.

Another important contribution to the horizontal in American architecture was the American Disabilities Act, which mandated that buildings be more accessible and gave us things like the ubiquity of ramps and large bathrooms. Even the steps of buildings have become less imposing.

ABN: Well, that’s a concrete embodiment of horizontality as a symbol of equality and access.

MD: Then there’s convention centers.

ABN: Are there any convention centers that you really like?

MD: I don’t know. There are some nicer ones, but they’re really just enclosures for the pop-up stores or other kinds of temporary structures.

I want to go back to those city squares. They’re really inspiring places. You feel really small in a place like Tiananmen Square or Red Square – moreso, I’d say, than when you stand next to the Sears Tower. Human beings generally operate on the horizontal plane when we walk, when we drive, when we interact with others. When you have a space that large that is enclosed by buildings, when you can also see from one end to the other, it impresses you. The Mall in Washington DC is another horizontal space like that, slightly larger than Central Park and much easier to see across.

But the natural way of architects seems to be to build large, enclosed, vertical spaces. You’re not inspired in the same way by a building like the Pentagon. It mainly feels like a bunch of corridors. Large horizontal open spaces seem to be inspiring, but when you put a roof on it, it tends to feel like a warehouse.

ABN: What do you think is the largest single horizontally-oriented thing that human beings have built? For vertical, the answer has to be skyscrapers or radio towers. But what about the horizontal?

MD: It may be the particle accelerators.

ABN: Right! Those are huge.

MD: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is something like 17 miles in circumference. There’s a big one in Illinois too, Fermilab.

ABN: Right, that’s at least big enough that you can raise buffalo inside it.

MD: Huh?

ABN: Sorry, not inside the particle accelerator. In the land enclosed by it. They have buffalo there. It’s a little prairie.

MD: Oh! Ha. But a 17-mile circle is a lot of space. Think about if you drew that on top of a city.

Think about rail lines, the freeway system – again, not enclosed spaces, but massive structures.

ABN: It’s interesting that the overall character of humankind’s horizontal structures is so different. It makes you think about the world’s iconic buildings differently when you compare them to these other massive structures – what’s more valuable, the Sears Tower or the interstate? I don’t know.

MD: It just goes back to the idea that the basic character of buildings is vertical. You’re creating a shell of space up in the air. If it were only occupying the ground it would just be a mat to sit on.

ABN: Right – to be a building, it has to go above your head.

MD: And to go above your head, it has to be vertical.

Previous Elements of Place discussion: “Control the vertical and the horizontal” • Next Elements of Place discussion: “Don’t flatten the peaks”

Images: Detail of frontispiece from Adelard of Bath’s Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements, c. 1309-1316 (teaser from home page); St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons (top); Fermilab outside Batavia, Illinois (bottom).