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Zeppelins, Fortresses, and Collapsing Campaniles: Predicting a Skyscraper's Life Expectancy Zeppelins, Fortresses, and Collapsing Campaniles: Predicting a Skyscraper's Life Expectancy
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The Perpetual Motion Quest, the Doctrine of the Scrap Heap, or the Cod of Change: Skyscrapers and Economic Obsolescence The Perpetual Motion Quest, the Doctrine of the Scrap Heap, or the Cod of Change: Skyscrapers and Economic Obsolescence
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Henry James and the Impossibility of Ruins Henry James and the Impossibility of Ruins
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The Liquidity of Urban Capital: Pulp Visions The Liquidity of Urban Capital: Pulp Visions
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Reordering the City Reordering the City
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Temporal Inversions Temporal Inversions
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The Totemic Ruin The Totemic Ruin
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6 The Metropolitan Life in Ruins Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1893–1919
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Published:February 2010
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Abstract
In 1909, Metropolitan Life, the world's largest life insurer, completed the tallest tower in New York and in America. Shortly thereafter, the magnificent building suffered a series of catastrophes, such as being struck by the tail of a comet, exposed to poisonous gases, and submerged under an ocean. Despite these debacles, the building somehow remained standing in apparent perpetuity. The motif of the ruin became firmly identified with the emerging genre of science fiction and the skyscrapers of New York City. The notion of modern skyscrapers as antiquated ruins was belied by Manhattan's economic geography. The skyscraper's lifespan appeared to be limited by economic even more than technological and aesthetic obsolescence. Critics who coined the terms “doctrine of the scrap heap” or “perpetual motion quest,” which anticipate later critiques of creative destruction, remained largely ambivalent about, rather than overtly critical of, the skyscraper's troubled economic status. One writer who held architecture to higher standards and denounce the reduction of the office building to an economic problem was Henry James.
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