Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)

of the first period, regarded as modest in their proportions today, were built in New York. The Flatiron Building, the Times Building, the Metropolitan, the Equitable, the Singer Building and the Whitehall Building were counted among the wonders of the modern world. By the 1930s the average height of skyscrapers had exceeded 300 metres. With its 381 metre height, the Empire State Building became an emblematic icon of the Free World. Another threshold was reached when the 421-metre twin towers of the World Trade Centre were erected.

In the Cold War the skyline of Moscow was dominated by the towers of the Kremlin, the belfry of Ivan the Great and other onion church-domes. This was in part neutralized by the apartment blocks mass-produced in the thirties and forties. That was why the Ministerial Council of the Soviet Union decreed the erection of very tall buildings. Within five years, seven high-rises were built at the junctions of large thoroughfares or in the bends of rivers. Surrounded by large expanses, these complexes usually comprised a central tower flanked by wings meant to provide a transition to the neighbouring architecture. The arrangement of the bulk and the finish given to the fapades are characterised by a confused eclecticism often making muted allusions to Manhattan. The best-known of these blocks is the Lomonosov University or the Hotel Ukraine, which is surrounded by eight pinnacles on Kutuzov Avenue.

Once again, building skyscrapers is all the rage in Moscow. To plans by the English architect Lord Norman Foster, a 600-plus metre, 119-storey skyscraper is to be built on a site five kilometres from the Red Square. It cannot aspire to the world record, as by that time the eight-hundred metre colossus of Buri Dubai will have been completed. In the 1950s, a scaled-down "replica" of Lomonosov University was built in Warsaw: the House of Science and Technology faithfully emulates the example set by its "Big Brother" in Moscow. This, however, will soon be dwarfed by the new skyscrapers of Warsaw.

The rapid development of 19th century technologies and the widespread use of steel, concrete and aluminium have by now enabled architects to raise constructions reaching to heights in excess of six to eight hundred metres, thus literally scraping the skies.

Nearing conclusion in India is the World Centre for Vedic Arts, which, with its height of 667 metres, is about to take the lead from the 452-metre Petronas Twin Towers erected in Kuala Lumpur in 1997 or the 443-metre Sears Towers in Chicago built in 1974.

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