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At best the City is kind of massive sculpture; no a massive sculpture park. We are not talking here about the made-at-a-stroke cities like Brasilia; nor of harmonious, well planned renaissance and baroque cities of Italy or the bigger, well supervised developments of Vienna or Paris; simply big cities where zoning, planning, aesthetic controls are not over excessive; where, not over-consciously, the city jostles itself together into a kind of harmony; Houston or Dallas for example; splendid Sculpture parks; but I like to think aesthetes were not excessively involved when it came to one building being juxtaposed to another. A sculpture park, then; the sculptures just happen to be 800 feet tall. Such mega-sculptural groupings accumulate over decades, over a century, disequilibrated at moments in their history, as in the creation of any work of art; reattaining a harmony which is perhaps further unbalanced by a new feature. Manhattan is the epic example (though it is customary to trace such tower grouping back to medieval San Gimignano.) In Manhattan it is fascinating to see how the first bulks of downtown were challenged by early skyscrapers such as the Woolworth building in 1913; how in turn that height was challenged with the alternative Decoish verticality of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State mid town; how the dialogue returned in the seventies to the uncompromising statement of the World Trade Centre towers and how, almost, this irruption was felt excessive and needed mollification by means of the soothing profiles of the Battery Park buildings by Cesar Pelli. (Written, of course, before September 11th 2001).

In fact the dynamic that propels huge buildings skywards is often purely (and I do indeed mean here a kind of purity of motivation) competitive bragging. This was the case in San Gimignano, that proto Manhattan, merchant princes competing for precedence; it was the spirit that made the Empire State building calculatingly just exceed the Chrysler building. And now, to my delight, in Riad we have the naked and declared competition of two sheiks each erecting an epic tower. San Gimignano in Saudi Arabia!

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