“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them.” —Federico Garcia Lorca

A town of skyscrapers is to the sky what a bed of nails is to a gown of veils.

“Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they’re just things they maneuver through, but the makeup of a person is influenced by the nature of spaces.”

―David Adjaye

At the height of the High-rise Wars, overreaching ambitions aspired higher than spires tuned to celestial choirs. But to no avail.

“The difficulty with big cities does not lie in skyscrapers or high-rises per se; rather, it is the values concealed within those buildings which lead to the loss of our humanity and our sense of spiritual emptiness.”

―Ma Yansong

The sky too has its limits. Buildings for beings whose elevators go all the way from the basement to the roof garden are limited to Max Headroom, so called by a talking head covering the High-rise Wars from the sky booth. When overreaching upstarts planned a megalith that would exceed the sky’s limit, the sky chief called in a crane with arms like building booms.

“Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought to scale the highest heavens.”

―Marshall McLuhan

The crane swept up the upstarts that challenged Max Headroom, swinging them off to disparate lands where people communicated in a confusion of metaphors, and only the occasional pyramid or totem pole might exceed the height of a pita parlor or pancake house. Then the crane spread its arms and returned to its domain, with yet another trophy of the High-rise Wars.

“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.”

―Franz Kafka