Reaching for the Sky

The Empire State Building towers above New York City. It is once again the city's tallest building, restored to this mournful honor by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A monument in steel and stone, it is a working office building, "a miracle of modern technology," and at the same time a secular icon reaching for the sky, "the dream of utopia realized on the grid."

From the street we look up at the building. We walk along Fifth Avenue, turn onto 34th Street, go around the block, then inside to enclose ourselves in steel structure as we ride the elevators to the top. Suddenly we are gazing down at the city. The building is below us. We never see the whole.

In Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams Mark Kingwell wants to show us all of it. Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author of eight books, combines his academic discipline with an overwhelming embrace of architectural meaning. The result is a wonderful ascent from solid ground to the sky above. Who designed and built the Empire State Building? Where does it belong in the philosophical reaches of architecture? Kingwell's exuberant, over-the-top prose is weighed down by similes and hyphenated adjectives, but it always takes off, flying high like the building itself. He combines ecstasy and analysis, description and speculation, to "convey the profound experience of coming at something again and again, from different angles." What he likes best is to stress the image, the icon. The Empire State Building is everywhere—on postcards, T–shirts, refrigerator magnets, inside snow globes. Best of all it is captured in photographs by Lewis Hine of the skilled construction workers suspended high on steel girders. We find it in books by Ayn Rand, Saul Bellow, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

An overwritten book, yes, but go with Kingwell around and around the building—and up to the top and back. Just as your view of the building changes, he gives you a new field to contemplate—architecture, photography, contemporary literature, philosophy. He lets us see its beginning, in the shadow of the stock-market crash in 1929, with Al Smith and his financial partner, John J. Raskob, investing in a project to create office space, "the greedy logic of the grid," to shore up the economy. Some of his best writing, appearing in the early pages of the book, describes the speed with which the Empire State was built (in just eighteen months), and the smooth process of assembling materials and building "a heaven-seeking tower made of solid metal and stone, and serving the needs of business."

From his description of its conception and creation, he soars into a celebration of the building as a "representation of built form, of the logic of construction." Form follows function. We are introduced to architecture in all its metaphysical meaning, in whatever order Kingwell's thoughts take him. He chronicles the building's "transformation from mere material edifice into larger-than-real symbol," ecstatically describing its widespread image, engaging his favorite philosophers—Barthes, Heidegger, Veblen, among others—to enhance its meaning. He compares the Empire State with the Eiffel Tower, the Chrysler Building, new skyscrapers in the Far East, all the while eagerly pushing us to his favorite subject, what he deems the icon.

Are there other images as widely encountered as the Empire State? Not many. We are told that Edvard Munch's painting The Scream appears on "sound-effect pillows" and loses its significance. Kingwell quotes Walter Benjamin, whose "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1934) states that the commercialization of a work of art (or image of a building) reduces it to a mute object. Kingwell writes about this essay, in almost the same words, in his fine earlier book In Pursuit of Happiness (1998). (Is a writer permitted to recycle his own prose? Yes.)

The...