The high-rise is dead, and no one is mourning. Conceived by a young urban context, it was murdered by the elevator (its birth father) in its infancy. The murderer did it over and over again, placing the carcasses on display piled up like pancakes and wrapped in shiny material, like an obsessive serial killer with a penchant for arrangement and artistic expression. Lacking the ability to dream of anything other than height, it created taller and taller (sometimes gymnastically impressive) pancake towers. Its accomplice and admirer is the square foot price. The elevator has always suffered from an inferiority complex - it is the underachieving sibling of the teleporter, surviving on cables and maintenance men and unable to yet deviate from the straight line; but it does its job. It does not matter that the floors are stacked vertically; if the 3rd floor is in Antarctica and the 72nd floor is on Venus, we are still in a high-rise unless our eyes (these days we can trick them) tell us that we have moved a hundred million kilometers between two worlds. What is a world? In Strange Days (1995), one man’s mundane existence is another man’s technicolor: people pay big bucks to procure experience tapes of another person’s life, seeing and touching the world through a different body. Science fiction extrapolates a reality where a numb humanity feeds on post-produced dreams of better (or at least more interesting) worlds. Amiens Cathedral is a one-floor highrise - without physical teleportation there is a changing of worlds; there is no boredom in heaven.

(Book on the theory of high rise written in conjunction with an independent thesis in satisfaction of the Master in Architecture degree at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2015.)