Tower Envy
Well, it’s official: the CN Tower in Toronto (pictured above) is no longer the world’s tallest free-standing structure. That honour now belongs to the Burj Dubai tower in that certain city in the desert. While this might lead some to wax on about the ominous symbolism of this event as the inevitable decline of Western civilization, I for one welcome the news with a curious shrug.
For one, it is surprising that a concrete communications tower in Canada managed to hold the title for so long since its completion in the 1970s. During that time, a myriad of different places slated to imminently take over the world have wowed us all with phallic displays of height- think Japan, the Asian Tigers, China. We’ve had the Petronas Towers, Taipei 101, an immense structure or twenty in Shanghai. It finally took the most overblown story of them all, the development frenzy of Dubai, to relegate the CN Tower to has-been status.
I doubt anyone has ever been scared that Canada would be the next 800-pound gorilla on the world stage, and yet amongst all the rising powers and blossoming skylines worldwide, a quiet Toronto landmark went unchallenged - perhaps because, being Canadian, it went mostly unnoticed. This should certainly not come as a surprise: the Great White North has never been the one to beat, has never been the global standard to best: that distinction belongs to our esteemed American neighbours. In that respect, you’d think the Sears Tower in Chicago was the sworn enemy of ‘developing’ nations worldwide.
Of course, one could ask why any of this really matters. With so many extravagant skyscrapers and mega-projects weighing down on our globe, the prestige of hosting the world’s tallest is fleeting at best. Of course, it makes sense that Dubai would go way above and beyond all others: if you are hoping to make a harsh desert into a premier tourist destination, you have to do something to attract people’s attention. While other urban areas build these monuments to corporate and/or government folly to bring prestige to their respective lands, in Dubai it seems these mega-projects are the city. There’s nothing else there, so better make it impressive somehow.
On a more somber note, the Burj Dubai story perhaps demonstrates our collectively destructive tendency to decry the state of the world on one hand, while digging ourselves ever deeper into that state with the other. In our time of environmental destruction, shocking inequality and political instability, the extravagance has never been greater nor the luxury more surreal. As much as everyone likes to feign concern for ‘global’ issues, we are hooked on an industrialization and construction binge like the world has never seen. With all that needs fixing in our world, with all the good uses the massive amounts of global capital could be put to, how a glorified theme park gorging on oil money in the desert is considered a marvel of our time is beyond me. I guess one man’s miracle is another man’s folly.
In a neat little book called A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright theorizes that civilizations are at their most extravagant, building their most impressive monuments (be they to deities, oil or corporate finance), right before they collapse. Sometimes I wonder if the ever-growing lineage of world’s tallest skyscrapers is a sign of one big, extended blowout party for industrial humanity as we know it. And as easy as it is to criticize Dubai, the society that gave way to the CN Tower is equally as complicit in this self-destruction. I guess, if nothing else, we’ll always have a nice view from the top.