Henriette Steiner - Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture

Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steiner, Henriette, 1980- author. | Veel, Kristin, author.

Title: Tower to tower : gigantism in architecture and digital culture / Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031894 | ISBN 9780262043922 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture--Composition, proportion, etc. | Digital communications--Social aspects. | Largeness (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC NA2760 .S76 2020 | DDC 720.1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031894

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For Sofus

Maria Finn, Unfinished #19, pencil on paper, 29 42 cm, 2018. Maria Finn.

This book is the latest outcome of our long-term collaboration around a number of articles, edited books, conferences, seminars, travels, and many more challenging, weird, fun, rich, tiring (especially for the people around us), and unexpected discussions, disruptions, and digressions than we ever thought would be necessary to precede the writing of this bookconversations that go back more years than we feel ready to recall. We would like to thank the Independent Research Fund Denmark; the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Denmark; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Churchill College, Cambridge, as well as our respective departments at the University of Copenhagen and the whole community around the Uncertain Archives research group for encouraging our work at key moments in the process. The effort of a much greater number of institutions and people than can be mentioned here has gone into the production of this book, and we are grateful for the support we have received throughout. Moreover, we would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues including Daniela Agostinho, Lene Asp, Peter Carl, Natalie Gulsrud, Alison McDougall-Weil, David Midgley, Maximilian Sternberg, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Frederik Tygstrup, Andrew Webber, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their readings and thoughtful feedback on the developing manuscript ideas. We also would like to thank Pamela Siska from MITs Writing and Communication Center, Rachel Malkin and Merl Storr for their courageous help with language editing of wild chapter drafts, as well as Kristen Van Haeren for her help with image selection. At the MIT Press, we are grateful to our editor Doug Sery for all his support and encouragement and would like to thank Noah J. Springer and the rest of the production team for their thorough and thoughtful work on our manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Maria Finn for the beautiful and sensitive drawings she made for the book.

Maria Finn, Unfinished #16, pencil on paper, 29 42 cm, 2018. Maria Finn.

Copenhagen, May 2019

When my mother died, I bought a house that needed a new roof. Somehow crisis and construction, eruption and containment, loss and latitude often come as one package, I have found.

Henriette visited me, and I took her to the top of the scaffolding that surrounded the entire house at that point to inspect the construction work. Neither of us were very agileHenriette seven months pregnant and I as always afraid of heights. We sat on the roof, perhaps six meters above ground, surrounded by scaffolding. We talked about physical scaffolds, emotional ones, and the theoretical scaffolding that we as academics build around the phenomena we want to explore in order to get at eye level with our objects of study.

We had been working together for some time on the changing connotations of transparency and invisibility today. We had received a grant to host a range of conferences; we had brought together scholars from around the globe and from different academic disciplines for discussion; we were editing books and special issues and cowriting a number of articles. Yet although we could see that our ideas had struck a chord, we had trouble finding ways to word exactly what we were looking at, as if the questions themselves needed support, were unsafe, and left us vulnerable. I do not recall if this was when the idea for this book first took shape. As I think back, the idea was definitely latently present that quiet afternoon atop my house stripped of its roof. Depending on ones perspective, it is an opportunity, a conundrum, or an impasse that the question of how to erect something is somehow silently present in sites of destruction.

Remains of scaffolds have been found in caves in southern France, where they are believed to have supported those who painted the walls with reindeer, aurochs, mammoths, and horses seventeen thousand years ago. In Hong Kong, scaffolds of bamboo with nylon string, up to 100 meters high, are not uncommon. In the European Union, the design and erection of scaffolding is regulated to ensure that the purpose of a working scaffold is to provide a safe place of work with safe access suitable for the work being done. According to this standard, safety should be independent of the materials of which the scaffold is made.

Yet the standard does not seem to account for theoretical scaffoldings constructed to support arguments and words. Although the scaffoldings used in construction work and even emotional scaffoldings are somehow held in check by the object (or subject) that they support, there is always a danger that theoretical scaffolds might be supporting something that is not really therethat, in fact, they are creating the gigantic object whose construction they support as they raise us inch by inch above the ground.

This chapter outlines a theoretical and methodological framework for the investigation carried out by the book you now hold in your hands. By moving from the Eiffel Tower to the Twin Towers and then to One World Trade Center and beyondfrom one gigantic tower to the nextthis book charts gigantism as a significant phenomenon of the present cultural moment and considers its ties to the past. The chapter asks why we should pay attention to gigantism today and suggests how we might go about it. But we also discuss the risk that we become part of the vanishing ontological borderline with which our study of gigantism engagesa borderline that we sense as an entrapment, an uncomfortably sticky position from which to work. So what kind of balancing acton a wobbly scaffolding with no railingsdo we need to perform if we are to tease out the workings of gigantism today?