hmmmm.....
falconcity.....
xanadu effect in the making?
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The Xanadu Effect - Editorial
Edward Tenner
What architectural monuments say about their owners.
On the evening of Dec. 28, 1999, Frank Zarb, chairman of the National Association of Securities Dealers, stood in a millennium-ready Times Square and watched as more than 18 million light-emitting diodes burst to life in an eight-story, $37 million display of financial and marketing exuberance. The source of this brilliance -- the world's largest video display, called the Market-site Tower -- was not just an engineering marvel. It was the new and very public face of an organization whose flagship securities exchange, the Nasdaq, would post a record index of 4000 the next day. Within months, of course, the Nasdaq would collapse. Now the Marketsite Tower, still stunning, presides over humbled earnings among its member companies and an even humbler stock index.
Coincidence? Taken literally, the idea that a building might sink a market seems nonsense. But giant structures, from the pyramids to the NASD's latest effort, clearly are linked to the fortunes of the organizations that envision them. The only uncertainty is how. Think of this mysterious relationship as the Xanadu Effect.
Xanadu, you may recall, was the palatial centerpiece of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the brilliantly unfair film biography of William Randolph Hearst. Welles borrowed the name (if not the caves of ice) from Coleridge and modeled the place after Hearst's own grand folly, La Cuesta Encantada, or "The Enchanted Hill," a neo-Hispanic latifundium overlooking San Simeon Bay in central California. It became famous as Hearst Castle. (Its owner preferred to call it a "ranch.") On its 24,000 acres were a 354,000-gallon swimming pool, a private zoo and four main buildings with a total of 165 rooms. Along with other such extravagances, the estate helped send Hearst into trusteeship late in life. The cavernous halls of Welles' gloomy cinematic Xanadu seemed to filmgoers -- as the real, happier building must have appeared to many Hearst Corp. public investors -- the very image of the pride that goes before a fall.
As markets crash and companies fold, it is tempting to attach the same significance to the Marketsite Tower. In a 1997 article in Scientific American, William Mitchell, dean of the the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that big buildings had turned from cost-efficient machines to shareholder-paid CEO observatories.
High-technology companies, on the other hand, traded big architectural statements for virtual monuments on the Web. Yes, these surging corporations had poured billions into other forms of aggrandizement, from multipage newspaper ads to Super Bowl spots. But their headquarters had nearly always been horizontal complexes in the suburbs, not grand towers in established cities. Admirers saw this as a fitting discipline. The Marketsite Tower was a departure from structural reticence, perhaps even a tempting of fate.
Mitchell's essay evokes the fascination and unease that the gigantic engenders. Great buildings seem linked to the faltering fortunes of overweening egos, like Hearst's. They appear to accompany tyranny, too, most notoriously in Albert Speer's unfinished plans for a 180,000-seat Great Assembly Hall in Nazi-era Berlin, with a 1,000-foot-high dome said to be capable of producing its own rain clouds, the ultimate in Sturm und Drang. Its Red counterpart, largely completed, was Nicolae Ceaucescu's 2,000-room House of the People in Bucharest. Lined with Transylvanian marble, it reportedly consumed a fifth of Romania's gross national product. The realities of grandeur can be more bizarre than the delusions.
Critics like Mitchell are not necessarily against size or wealth; they do oppose flaunting it in three dimensions. They are the megalophobes. There is much to be said, however, for what one might call the macrophile point of view. Macrophiles do not necessarily endorse giant organizations. They do believe that Promethean projects are sometimes needed to light fires in the human mind.
HELPLESS GIANTS
In a 1999 report, Andrew Lawrence, a director at the securities firm Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, crystallized the megalophobe worldview when he proposed a Skyscraper Index correlating economic crises with completion of the world's tallest buildings. The Singer (1908) and Metropolitan Life (1909) buildings marked the depression of 1907-1910. Three of Manhattan's greatest corporate landmarks -- 40 Wall Street (1929), the Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) -- coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression.
The pattern: Giant buildings go up, markets go down. The energy crisis and speculative fever of the early 1970s saw the World Trade Center (1972-1973) and Sears Tower (1974). And the construction of the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1997 signaled the onset of the Asian economic crisis. (Looking ahead, Lawrence also pointed ominously to the planned completion of the 1,509foot Shanghai World Financial Center sometime around 2003.)
Outstanding exceptions, however, make the Skyscraper Index inconsistent, notably the 792-foot Woolworth Building, the earliest true icon of the genre, which was finished in a prosperous 1913.
More convincing than the cyclical argument is the organizational critique. Megalophobes propose that giant structures signal the onset of corporate decadence, like the oversize diamond stickpins in the cravats of Thomas Nast's jowly villains. As early as the 1950s, the historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted that monuments like St. Peter's Basilica and Versailles were completed only after the Papacy and the French monarchy had passed their respective peaks. And indeed, the AT&T building went up shortly before the company's breakup; the Sears Tower as discount chains were rising; the IBM building in the twilight of the mainframe era; and Union Carbide's Connecticut headquarters on the eve of the Bhopal tragedy. On an even greater scale, a new Houston skyline arose just before the 1980s collapse of OPEC, becoming "seethrough" buildings by the early 1990s.
It is true that the high-tech companies whose fates are displayed so vividly on the Marketsite Tower have avoided such monumentality, but has architectural arrogance really fallen out of fashion? Perhaps it has merely moved from the exposed hilltops to the more discreet camouflage of landscaped bunkers, like Bill Gates' million home.
Gates' house -- like Hearst's, a satellite headquarters as well as a residence -- also demonstrates the political risks of showing off. It may be a stretch to say that the ballyhoo over the house played even a subliminal part in the Justice Department's pursuit of Microsoft, but it certainly didn't help Gates' case as Web humor sites spread news of the 104-electrician building crew and 800-pound doors. Never mind that Thomas Edison had also lived luxuriously. In the public, Gates was starting to turn mind from eccentric, driven prodigy to defensive, cocooned tycoon.
THE CASE FOR THE COLOSSAL
Does pride, then, inevitably predict a fall? Macrophiles can counter with object lessons of their own. The pyramids were once viewed as sublime follies, beacons to the tomb robbers they were supposed to repel. In 1971, though, the physicist Kurt Mendelssohn argued in American Scientist that the real purpose of the pyramids was not mortuary but political and economic. These vast public works, and the conscription that built them, were a means to transtorm a people or scattered tribes, villages and cults into the earth's first centralized state. They announced the dawn, not the twilight, of Egyptian greatness. Drawing on Mendelssohn, the anthropologist Mark P. Leone found a similar transformative power in the striking Mormon temple soaring above the Capital Beltway just outside Washington. The very act of financing it, he observed, strengthened the church on the East Coast simply by bringing its members together.
Giant secular structures also galvanize societies. The U.S. Capitol was built for a great power decades before America became one. Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal flourished for decades before the postwar railroad crisis. And completing a sumptuous skyscraper in 1931 has hardly doomed General Electric to sclerotic bureaucracy. Indeed, the halfempty masterpieces of the Depression became icons of New York and other cities, repaying their costs manyfold.
Big, like small, can be beautiful. After the humiliation of the Franca-Prussian War, the Eiffel Tower helped restore pride in French technology. It brought to Paris the daring, beautiful structural designs Gustave Eiffel had invented for remote railroad viaducts. Opposed by artists who denounced it in a petition as "a repulsive column made of screwed-together tin," the Eiffel Tower ultimately came to be a symbol not only of French engineering prowess, but of the Parisian elegance and taste it was once thought to threaten.
In London, I was once interviewed in the massive Broadcasting House, completed in 1932 and initially disdained even by the BBC's imperious first director general, Sir John (later Lord) Reith. But its imposing dimensions and glorious detailing surely helped inspire the quality of the productions inside, on the same premise that required BBC announcers to read the 6 p.m. radio news in black tie.
Of course, anyone with deep pockets can build big. Using scale to unite and inspire is another matter. There is no single formula, but technological enterprises have helped show the way. The physicist Robert R. Wilson, founding director of Fermilab, showed that high structures, high technology and high culture could go together. When he built the world's most powerful particle accelerator in 1972 in the Illinois plains west of Chicago, he set environmental and aesthetic goals that complemented his scientific aims.
Wilson devoted valuable real estate not to some office park "campus" but to a restoration of the prairie of pre-Columbian times, complete with bison. Sculpture, including one of Wilson's own design (on the theme of broken symmetry), complements the landscape. Wilson also helped design the 15-story administration building, complete with double towers inspired by the Cathedral of Beauvais, the tallest in France. The result was a beautiful complex that to this day attracts gifted researchers to a collegial setting-- proof that lofty structures need not engender grandiose thinking.
THE SPIRIT OF A COMPANY
Clearly, giant buildings are tied to the character of their creators. That's the Xanadu Effect. It is neither a blessing nor a curse, merely the demonstration on a grand scale of an organization's essence.
The good news is that, troubled though its creators may be, the Marketsite Tower has more in common with the happier products of bigness like Fermilab and the Eiffel Tower than it does with Charles Foster Kane's melancholy palace. It is an engineering tour de force. And it incorporates the technological principles of the companies it seeks to represent, both in its giant video screen and in the constant flow of information that it so vividly displays. The tower demonstrates how technology can dramatize itself.
But what else can it do? The economist Anatole Kaletsky recently said in the London Times that the latest technology boom was "a blind alley paved with gold." One could argue that the Marketsite Tower also was a flashy achievement with no real substance. Indeed, an anonymous tenant of the tower's interior called it, in Metropolis magazine, "a weird, dystopian U-boat designed by Fritz Lang on antidepressants."
But for all the Nasdaq's turmoil, its pyrotechnic sign has not lost the capacity to anchor Times Square, dazzling even image-saturated natives with a mesmerizing feat of engineering and showman-ship. In both its disappointment as a corporate strategy and its triumph as a corporate icon, it teaches that what will lead business out of its current malaise is not thinking smaller, but aiming higher.
Ed word Tenner is a visiting researcher of Princeton University and the author of Why Things Bite Back (Vintage).
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