Call for Papers
Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers 7 to 11 March
2006, Chicago, IL
The Tall Building Geographically Reconsidered
The tall building has been subject to consideration (and reconsideration) by
commentators from a range of academic and non-academic frames. This call for
papers seeks to solicit current geographical scholarship on the fortunes,
past and present, of this specific built form, be it a commercial skyscraper
or residential highrise. It is over a century since Louis Sullivan's essay
entitle 'The Tall Office Building Architecturally Considered' was published
in Lippincott's (1947 (1896)). In that essay Sullivan combined pragmatic
acceptance of the tall building with an enthusiastic interest in the
'problems' to which these lofty buildings gave rise: 'The problem of the
tall building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent
opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to
the proud spirit of man'. French urban geographer, Jean Gottmann, pursued
just such questions when he asked in the pages of Geographical Review
(1966), ‘why the skyscraper?’. For Gottman, the skyscraper was ‘an important
geographical phenomenon’ through which we ‘get into geography’, as the more
recent ‘tall’ geographies of Mona Domosh and Larry Ford have shown. In the
1980s, Ada Louise Huxtable’s essay 'The Tall Building Artistically
Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style' (1984), described the tall
building as 'puzzling and paradoxical': 'both standard-bearer and whipping
boy for modernists and postmodernists of every persuasion'. More recently,
the tall building has been given new life by architect Ken Yeang. His essay
The Skyscraper Bioclimatically Considered (1997) added this building type to
emergent architectural responses to the environmental problems of the city.
This tradition of skyscraper scholarship is shadowed by the vast commentary
– academic, political and populist – generated by the poor cousin of the
skyscraper, the residential highrise or tower block. Much of that
scholarship has been pre-occupied with the social question of tall living:
be it framed in terms of quality of life, post-occupancy studies, resident
satisfaction, or experiences of inclusion and exclusion.
This call for papers provides an opportunity for geographers to advance this
tradition of scholarship in critical new directions, at a moment when there
is not only a ‘real world’ imperative – tall and supertall buildings are
proliferating in a range of settings as never before – but also the
theoretical inspiration ¬offered by the convergence between geography and
the socio-technical concerns of science and technology studies. The session
organisers encourage papers from scholars offering critical interpretations
of the following:
> Everyday socio-technical aspects of living and working in tall buildings
> Skyscrapers and highrises as building events
> Systems of construction, maintenance and management required by tall buildings
> The local and transnational knowledge, professional and technical fields
associated with tall building design and production
> The everyday politics of tall buildings, including resident and other
urban activisms
> Tall buildings in processes of contemporary urban development, including
regeneration and signature urban design and architecture
> Globalisation and tall buildings
> The science of tall buildings
This list is not exhaustive and only suggestive of the topics that may be of
interest. There are no historical or regional limits for case studies.
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Ignaz Strebel
([log in to unmask]) no later than 15th September 2005.
Session conveners: Jane M. Jacobs and Ignaz Strebel, AHRC Highrise Project,
Institute of Geography, The University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street,
Edinburgh EH8 9XP (Scotland, UK). Tel. : +44 (0)131 650 2662.
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