The parallelism of time

Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream comes true.

Frank Lloyd Wright intended his Mile High Illinois skyscraper to be the focal point of Broadacre City—a theoretical city he began planning in the 1920s. While a one-mile-high skyscraper might have seemed fantastically out of place in Wright’s era, The Illinois skyscraper project was an exploration of horizontal space because, as he put it, some cities are simply “incorrigible” and Broadacre could use a tall building to act as a cultural and social hub, which would address some of the sprawl issues associated with growing urban spaces.

The foundation of Wright’s building was a massive column, shaped like an inverted tripod, sunk deeply into the ground. This supported a slender, tapering tower with cantilevered floors. In keeping with his belief that architecture ought to be organic, Wright likened this system to a tree trunk with branches.

He planned to use gold-tinted metal on the facade to highlight angular surfaces along balconies and parapets and specified Plexiglas for window glazing. Inside the building, mechanical systems were to be housed inside hollow cantilevered beams. To reach the building’s upper floors, Wright proposed atomic-powered elevators that could carry 100 people per trip.

Wright believed that it would have been technically possible to construct such a building even at the time it was proposed. At the time, the tallest skyscraper in the world was New York’s Empire State Building, which stood at less than a quarter of the proposed height for The Illinois.

It probably would have been possible to erect a self-supporting steel structure of the required height, but, of course, steel comes with a host of strength-to-weight challenges that arise when building structures of such great heights.

Not surprisingly, Dubai’s Burj Dubai clearly resembles the original design of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘The Illinois’—the only difference being is that The Illinois was designed 50 years earlier.

Architecture critics always cite a handful of stories of unbuilt skyscrapers as the best of the style and, in doing so, completely neglect the vast majority of completed projects.

The folklore surrounding classic skyscrapers that never saw completion tells us much about what motivates both architects and their clients. These tales beg the question, what is it about working in the tall building genre that compels architects to produce such interesting work?

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