Cities Without Shadow: The Harsh Face of the Skyscraper

People once knew the afternoon by the angle of light on a wall and the seasons by the length of shadows, and this book asks what the skyscraper, an engineering achievement it refuses to call evil, has taken from those who walk below. In Manhattan the street becomes an artificial canyon, and the book argues that a humane city begins with the street, separates the merciful shade of a tree, an arcade or a mashrabiya from the harsh shadow of towers, and recalls the Damascene courtyard where shade carried the scent of jasmine and water. It weighs Mies van der Rohe's dream of transparency and Le Corbusier's vertical city, which delivered the tower without always delivering the garden, against Jane Jacobs, who read the city from the sidewalk, and Jan Gehl, who saw it at walking pace. From supertalls that sell sky views to those above while blocking the sky for those below, it moves through Bosco Verticale in Milan, Copenhagen, Dubai, Paris and Barcelona's Eixample, the balcony as a threshold in the air, glass and heat, and the city that can no longer see the stars. It concludes that the enemy is forgetting those who walk below, and that the sky belongs to the human right to place and should never become a privilege of the upper floors.