Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (review)

Reviewed by: Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams Roberta Moudry (bio) Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams. By Mark Kingwell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+235. $26. There is a specific moment on Route 3’s approach to New York City when the Manhattan skyline appears straight ahead, mirage-like, before disappearing as the road dips down to the Lincoln Tunnel. At center stage, the Empire State Building rises, its vertical chrome-and-nickel panels shimmering, its proportions striking among the cacaphony of sizes and shapes of the city’s structures—the ultimate symbol of New York. The building holds other claims to our imagination—we still marvel at a construction process that produced a completed building in a brief eighteen months (and under budget), growing skyward at a rate of four-plus stories a week, and the masterful photographs of Lewis Hine that documented it. Built at a moment of national financial crisis and self-doubt, the Empire State Building was a monument before birth, an urban-scaled demonstration of confidence and determination, of accomplishment against all odds, played out as street theater to an audience of literally millions. Its name, Empire State, claimed, and still claims, the building project for the city, the state, and the nation, lending a publicness to what is in reality a privately financed speculative office building. There is a substantial scholarship that provides architectural and cultural history of the Empire State Building’s conception, design, and construction, as well as a number of books for the general reader. Now, Nearest Thing to Heaven, the work of University of Toronto philosophy professor [End Page 1067] Mark Kingwell, joins these as an extended personal reflection on the significance of the Empire State Building in a post–September 11 world. Seven chapters with enticing titles—“Palace of Dreams,” “Image and Icon,” “Scrape the Sky,” “System and Structure,” “Still Life,” “Moving Pictures,” and “Empire”—suggest a thematic approach that addresses specific observations and theoretical considerations. Kingwell is clear that his project is episodic and not linear, likening his exploration to a kaleidoscope. Although kaleidoscopes arrange glass chips into unusual but relational wholes, Kingwell fails to use his own organizational strategies to relate, or even to reign in, diverse perspectives of the Empire State Building. He considers the building’s iconicity; its structure, both essential and hidden; the meanings of its construction and its materiality; its interior and exterior qualities and the disjuncture between these aspects; and the proliferation of its image in photographs, films, replicas, and trinkets. These observations provide excellent starting points for serious discussion, but too often personal narrative, or historical or theoretical digressions, lead away, rather than back to, those central points. For example, a discussion of skyscraper structure moves from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century Paris and Henri Labrouste, but it does not bring the discussion to rest thoughtfully amid the structural and aesthetic skyscraper debates among American architects, engineers, and critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A sea of details and tidbits clutter rather than illuminate or intrigue. Part of the difficulty is embedded in the book’s underlying premise—that the Empire State Building was always better than the World Trade Center, that it was for a time overshadowed by the Twin Towers and has now regained its rightful place as Number One. If Kingwell had compared the two buildings, but without an agenda, he might have elaborated on their iconic selves (for one, iconic stature preceded construction, for the other, it emerged only after destruction), their respective abilities or shortcomings as workplaces and tourist attractions, and their role as participants in the spaces and skyline of the city. Instead, the text celebrates the Empire State Building while speaking disparagingly of the World Trade Center and of the entirety of European modernism, which Kingwell sees as the progenitor of the ubiquitous American glass-and-steel-slab skyscraper. The premise is problematic, and Kingwell’s explication of his antimodernist argument is fraught with factual errors and misinterpretations. For example, “Form follows function” was Louis Sullivan’s, not Frank Lloyd Wright’s, signature statement about skyscraper...

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