If the avant-garde architects of a century ago liked to invoke the unity of the arts represented by the Gothic era—in 1919, Walter Gropius argued that modern society needed to facilitate “the rebirth of that spiritual unity which found expression in the miracle of the Gothic cathedrals”—it was not because the arc of the 20th century tended toward such cohesion. In retrospect, these invocations seem more like acts of protest against the very opposite condition: the dissolution of architecture into a set of ever-multiplying specializations that no individual could hope to govern. In place of the master builder, the regime of economic efficiency began to dictate each aspect of building according to its own ruthless logic. If in 1950 Frank Lloyd Wright’s S.C. Johnson Research Tower in Wisconsin could still be reasonably described as an American Gesamstkunstwerk—a total work in which everything from the cantilevering structure to the custom furnishings served a unified purpose—no similar thing can be said of the skyscrapers of today. In all but those cases where a brand-name architect is brought in for a statement building, massing tends to be a product of real-estate economics and zoning laws, structure is the most expedient code-compliant option devised by engineers, and interior planning is highly formulaic.

Hugh Ferriss’s A City of Needles (1924), illustrating the architect Raymond Hood’s proposal for a future city of widely spaced supertall towers. Click to enlarge.