Architecture: Tall Orders

On the day the World Trade Center fell, the Empire State Building once again became the tallest building in New York City. In the months that followed, six of its commercial tenants ran off. They did not want to be in the tallest anything, anywhere, anymore. At a time when Dick Cheney was still being shuttled around to undisclosed locations, skyscrapers suddenly seemed like the most disclosed locations of all--bull's-eyes with nice lobbies attached. Within weeks of 9/11, Donald Trump canceled plans to make his new apartment-office tower in Chicago the tallest in the world. It didn't help that the U.S. economy was turning south at the same time, leaving empty space in office towers everywhere. For a while, it looked as though the tall building, at least in the U.S., might be one more casualty of war.

Three years later, big is beautiful again. On July 4, New York Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided at the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower, the office building that will rise at the World Trade Center site. New skyscraper projects are under way once more elsewhere in the city and around the country. Meanwhile, outside the U.S., where the taste for tall buildings never really abated, the skyscraper has also been poking its head up in very different ways, and not just for reasons having to do with security. Since the early '90s, tall buildings have been reshaped by a roster of global architecture stars whose vision is finally beginning to penetrate the more conservative American market.

Some of the best examples of that rethinking now fill two large galleries of the Museum of Modern Art's temporary outpost in Queens, N.Y. Using 25 spectacular architectural models (some 14 ft. high), "Tall Buildings," a show that runs at MOMA through Sept. 27, looks at the ways in which the skyscraper has evolved since the early '90s, at least in the hands of its most gifted practitioners, the kind who are proposing--and, hey, even producing, but usually in other nations--buildings that don't resemble the bland boxes that crowd most American downtowns. Nobody wants to summon back the naive techno-optimism of the 1950s and '60s. All the same, spend an hour at MOMA, and you can't resist gathering these buildings into an imaginary skyline as sexy as anything in The Jetsons. Remember when the future was fun? Perhaps it still is.

But scary fun all the same. After 9/11, skyscrapers first have to be places where people can feel comfortable on those high, exposed floors. Military-style security has re-entered the thinking of civilian architects in a way not seen since the Middle Ages, when every castle was a castle keep--both a courtly residence and a defensible perimeter. Maybe no one has been worried about security issues with more intensity than David Childs of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architect chiefly responsible for the final design of the new Freedom Tower. (That was supposed to be Daniel Libeskind, but that's another story.) "Like jazz, the skyscraper is a true American invention," says Childs. "Yet America is no longer a leader in the technology of high-rise buildings." He wants the building not only to symbolize rebirth at the Trade Center site but also to demonstrate that American thinking and construction can compare with the best new examples in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.