It's for a lack of focus. The twin towers are still a hole in the ground. Why? Because of foodfights among the 60 dozen or so interest groups who have a stake in it.

Personally I couldn't care less. They could all be holes in the ground. My own miserable mid sized city has barely a skyline at all. At almost 375,000 people it should - there's certainly other same sized burgs that do. But since we have infinite land and a city government that unilaterally annexes whomever they wish, there's no need to have an actual downtown. Well they think they do, but as far as anyone can tell the downtown is for government buildings, parking garages and a convention center. And of course the obligatory run down blight they can claim they are fixing. I'm afraid skylines are over and out in America.

The subject says it all. Three pages about skyscrapers, architecture, modernism. no photos.

I'm all bang alongside architectural experimentation, and to an extent excess - architecture is part art, after all.

But I'll be more impressed with systems that are maintainable in the future as well, and that work well with the demands of a changing world.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/24/AR2006062400509.html

I kinda thought the US (a bit more specifically) was starting to look outdated because we don't have an effective educational system, well-maintained transit infrastructure, or decent data infrastructure in most of the country.

I guess the buildings, yeah...sure, they're important too.

People act nice in a museum. Nobody wants to blow up a museum.

We've got way more important things to take care of here in the USA than having tall buildings...

This is just conspicuous consumption. It's a lot of foolishness.

When a business is in decline you milk the profit. You do not re-invest. It is the same way for the federal reserve bank and the U.S.

It'd be like replacing Boston with Las Vegas. Sure, it's shiny and glitzy and fun to visit once in a while, but it's also appallingly tacky.

How quickly will all those oddly-shaped marvels of pretention and mirrored glass look ridiculous and dated? Burj Al Arab is no timeless Empire State Building (although Al Kazim Towers is trying its damndest to be the Chrysler Building).

".....these "iconic buildings" lack social significance." What they lack is a Soul.

http://archnet.org/forum/view.jsp?message_id=225415

Honestly, I love big buildings. Its just these are almost always single-use, massive monstrosities that might be interesting to look at but serve not other use than to host offices. I remember dreaming about Soleri's arcologies - the possibilities of these are endless, and it simply makes me sad that our culture's architectural knowhow gets boiled down to simply more glass and steel places to conduct business.

For our governments lack the will to impose architecture on us. If only we were more like Russia, or China, or Dubai! I'd give up the franchise for pretty skyscrapers any day!

With planes having flown into skyscrapers and earthquakes coming up in unexpected places, and workers inside skyscrapers dependent upon phony air and working electricity to power air circulation and elevators, skyscrapers would seem to be the last idea one would take seriously.

To have 'cities' 'compete' by making skyscrapers is to become totally transparent about the 'bigger penis is better' outdated myth (it is 'girth', not length, that women want in a penis, I have heard from a scientist and I know). When will men get it?

Men who run cities, hopefully with women city-planners to calm them down architecturally, need to take stock. And re-think.

I love the excitement of entering a city with its skyline spread out before me as much as the next guy, but when you are actually IN the city it's what's right in front of you that matters. This could be a great time to focus on the human scale of America's cities and not spend as much time or money worrying about what's up 500 feet or more in the air.

Let Beijing and Moscow have all the fun for a while, they're behind us on the skyscraper front anyway.

Gosh, I haven't heard Soleri mentioned in years. I remember his book that was so highly touted in the Whole Earth Catalog, but his ideas seemed to be ginormous blocks or people living upstairs of their shops. In the 80s I visited Arcosanti, his compound in Arizona, and found it to be a very colorful slum filled with acolytes who had no interest in dealing with the real problems of architecture in the world. When I pointed out that his stair-filled town would be very hard in people in wheelchairs, they shrugged and said that with fewer cars there would be fewer accidents, and thus fewer wheelchairs. I decided at that point that they were cranks, not visionaries.

To have 'cities' 'compete' by making skyscrapers is to become totally transparent about the 'bigger penis is better' outdated myth (it is 'girth', not length, that women want in a penis, I have heard from a scientist and I know). When will men get it?

So you posit a feminist myth, that skyscrapers are about penises, then you tear men down for the myth YOU promulgate. Nice.

FYI, skyscrapers are skyscrapers, not PENISES. That is YOUR obsession.

Or are you prepared to tell us next that open pit mine owners are pussies?

and hits on a lot of things without delving into them.

$14 BILLION for a train station in Manhattan?!? THERE is the problem. That is a ridiculous number. The graft and criminality and paybacks must be astonishing. No wonder NY sits there dead in the water. Seven years down the WTC site lies flatter than a pancake- actually more like the frying pan.

Meanwhile Dubai just trumped everyone. Their Burj Dubai just became the tallest structure EVER built, even beating out a collapsed antenna that was once the world's tallest structure, and it is still a fifth of a MILE short of being COMPLETED!

Place The Burj against a scale photo of the Empire State Building and it positively looks rinky dink shrimpy next to this megaproject. Live two thirds of a mile in the sky? WHY NOT!? (and why didn't the article writer mention this iconic building anyway?)

You cannot beat skyscrapers for awe and excitement. Feminists trot out their made up straw man 'skyscraper is penis' thing, but would it be as exciting to walk through a vagina shaped building when you can instead be at the top of a grand view? Where is the fun of sitting in a hole in the ground? To count worms?