The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Theoretically Considered The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Gomez Luque, Mariano. 2019. The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Theoretically Considered. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41021634 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Theoretically Considered A dissertation presented by Mariano Gomez Luque to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Design Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2019 © 2019 Mariano Gomez Luque All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Prof. Neil Brenner Mariano Gomez Luque Abstract This dissertation outlines a portrait of the skyscraper within the context of the contemporary urban world, undertaking an analysis that spans the period contained between 1973 and the present. Through a critique of key theoreti- cal texts from the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the project traces the building’s manifold relations with logics of financial abstraction and urbanization, as well as its complex symbolic and spatial roles amid a peri- od characterized by global crises and the deployment of capital at a planetary scale. Assembled as a multilayered narrative in which architectural theory in- tersects with a constellation of critical discourses and a mosaic of visual materi- als, The Late Capitalist Skyscraper reads the ongoing metamorphoses of the type as intrinsically connected to emerging modalities of capital accumulation and its associated socio-spatial implications across a wide range of vertical urban landscapes and territorial formations. Keywords: skyscraper; vertical architecture; capital accumulation; late capitalism; finan- cial abstraction; urbanization; planetary iii iv THE LATE CAPITALIST SKYSCRAPER Theoretically Considered Mariano Gomez Luque Doctor of Design Dissertation Harvard University Graduate School of Design Advisors: Neil Brenner, Charles Waldheim, Douglas Spencer v page intentionally left blank Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments viii Prologue: Beyond the Long Twentieth Century 010 0. Metacommentary 022 1. Threshold 030 2. Vast Machine of Accumulation 054 3. The Late Capitalist Skyscraper 086 4. Appendix: Metamorphoses 128 Epilogue: Verticalarchitecture? 140 Image Credits 148 Bibliographic Index 149 vii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the kindness, support, and encouragement of a significant group of people during the past five years. First of all, I would like to extend a very special thank you to my outstanding advisor, Neil Brenner, for his continued, unflinching, extremely generous support and guidance throughout the full development of the project. Getting to know Neil, and to work with him, has undoubtedly been one of the greatest, most intellectually rewarding experiences of my academic life, and I feel privileged to count him as both a mentor and a friend. I also want to express my gratitude to Charles Waldheim, whose tactical guidance and powerful insights have shaped the project in fundamental ways, and to Douglas Spencer, whose brilliant work as architectural theorist has been foundational for the development of this dissertation. I am also crucially indebted to friends and colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, especially those from the Doctor of Design program, the Urban Theory Lab, and New Geographies. Thanks wholeheartedly go to comrades Julia Smachylo, Martín Arboleda, Daniel Ibañez, Ghazal Jafari, Roi Salgueiro-Barrio, Miguel Lopez-Melendez, Mojdeh Madavi, Pablo Perez-Ramos, Jeffrey Nesbit, Andreina Seijas, Liang Wang, Mike Chieffalo, Nikos Katsikis, Daniel Daou, Ali Fard, and Kiel Moe for extended and sustained dialogues and discussions about the project. I value highly the critical feedback given by close friends Pablo Roquero and Pablo Barría-Urenda, who generously read parts of the text as it was unfolding. I’m also grateful to Ivana Hrga-Griggs, whose strategic and logistical advice was instrumental in the completion of the thesis, and to Martin Bechthold for his support as Director of the DDes program at the GSD. Countless conversations with Krystelle Denis —from whom I learned (about design as much as everything else) a great deal over the past years— proved essential for the gestation, articulation, and crystallization of the thesis. Finally, a special thank-you-note goes to my brother Arístides, without whose unconditional support no dissertation would have been possible. viii For Norma & Rufo ix The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Beyond the Long Twentieth Century Prologue 10 Beyond the Long Twentieth Century This succinct book explores the following hypothe- sis: that the turn towards the late twentieth century marks the beginning of a moment of transformation in the historical trajectory of the skyscraper—a transi- tional phase whose main dimensions are intrinsically related to the intensified speculative and spatial dy- namics of capital after 1973. As a starting point, this conjecture can be further described by embedding the skyscraper within the larger spatiotemporal unfold- ing of capital during what Giovanni Arrighi calls the ‘long twentieth century.’ It is indeed at the onset of this long century when the type emerged, and to- wards its transition to the (long?) twenty-first one when the skyscraper becomes a global architectural form, whose meaning and roles within the contempo- rary world-economy acquire hitherto unprecedented levels of symbolic and spatial complexity. 11 The Late Capitalist Skyscraper Capital, Arrighi argues, is a historically specific yet abstract logic that evolves through spatiotemporal cycles, reinventing itself and growing increasingly so- phisticated and resilient —if also more unstable— as it moves through both space and time.1 As it unfolds, this logic or “virus”2 expands itself geographically, moving from one place to the other, concentrating in specific locations which then become epicenters of power at a global scale. The inner mechanics that regu- late this movement proceed, schematically, as follows: after all productive outlets and markets have been saturated or exhausted —which Arrighi calls ‘periods of material expansion’— and the rate of return begins to drop, then capital starts, as it were, “profiting from itself and speculating on itself, feeding on itself, by way of the stock market and its allied institutions,”3 a moment which in Arrighi’s terms entails the rise of a ‘period of financial expansion’.4 This dialectic of mater- ial and financial expansions, which constitutes the internal stages through which capital reproduces itself, is modeled on Marx’s famous formula of capital, M-C- M’, which expresses how money is transmuted into capital, which in turn creates more money, in an ever-expanding logic of accumulation.5 M-C-M’ is, then, reconceptualized by Arrighi as a “template for an entire historical process” and not simply as a formula that captures accumulation per se, as Marx would have it.6 Each of these ‘systemic cycles of accumulation,’ through which the historical movement of capital proceeds, lasts longer than a century yet progressively con- tracts its length as a new cycle supersedes it.7 Within this general conceptualiza- tion, what Arrighi terms ‘long twentieth century’ —the latest of these cycles after the Genoese, the Dutch, and the British— starts with the rise of the United States as a hegemonic power in the late nineteenth century, continues with its material expansion during the 1950s and 1960s, and enters into a terminal crisis, or its ‘au- tumn,’8 during the critical years of the early 1970s; more precisely, circa 1973.9 *** In relation to the study of an intrinsically capitalist architectural form such as the skyscraper, what Arrighi’s pathbreaking theory of capital’s historical trajecto- ry offers is the very possibility of rethinking the formal evolution of the building when seen through the lens of the ‘long twentieth century;’ that is, when concep- tualized as embedded within capital’s M-C-M’ historical template, vis-à-vis its ‘spring’ and ‘autumn’ as well as its inherently associated moments of ‘expan- sions.’ For it is certainly not a coincidence that the ‘birth’ of this architectural 12 Beyond the Long Twentieth Century type at the end of the nineteenth century takes place at the onset of the US hege- monic cycle of accumulation —itself initiated by a period of financial expan- sion—, nor that its subsequent stages of radical upscaling and spatial transforma- tion overlap with those recurrent moments of financial crises and structural reor- ganization of the capitalist system during the course of the twentieth century. This overall visualization of the skyscraper’s historical trajectory throughout the latest systemic cycle of capital —that is, of its embeddedness not just into its im- mediately political and more generally, its broader social context(s), but properly into the terrain of Historical unfolding itself; i.e., the consideration of its inscrip- tion within a much vaster logic or mode of production— is mobilized here not for the purpose of undertaking a general periodization