(no subject)

[camwyn]

Manhattan architecture does wonders for the mood, sometimes. Even when it's not necessarily the most attractive in the world, or even on the block. There is something insanely breathtaking about the sight of a forty-storey building, simply BECAUSE it is forty stories high... to think that we have done that, we have made that, and it stays up. To imagine being the one who laid the last brick looking around and thinking, "is that it? Are we done?" To realise that such marvels have been made in the lifetimes of individual people, rather than the generations it takes to build a cathedral (I count St. John the UnfinishedDivine as heir to that part of cathedral tradition). How much math must have gone into figuring that building out, how much education, how much thought and planning and effort of mind and body both...

There is more labour and more love, in its own way, in a New York City skyscraper than there is in many a family. I cannot imagine that these things would get built without someone, somewhere, loving what they do. Perhaps not the ones who pay for the building, nor the ones who inhabit it, but what bricklayer would risk his (or her) life three hundred feet above the street if there were another way to earn their daily bread? Even if they cared nothing for the building or the labour, there must have been something in them that said, This is a worthy thing and a cause I must labour in for someone's sake, and that should count for something.

Comments

[lekythen.livejournal.com]

I got that feeling in New York. It's one of the reasons why I would love to live there one day.

I get that feeling in London. For me it's more the amazement of seeing past and future sitting, not just comfortably side by side, but as if somehow they were always intended to be near one another. Bath, a Roman city with traces of the modern, just doesn't have the impact. London holds the sheer delight of looking through the London Eye to see Parliment and beyond it Westminster Abbey. The Millenium Dome, despite its problems and stupidity, looks like it simply fell into place on the Bank.

No crazy tall buildings though. That's something I love about New York. All those tall buildings... which curiously never made me feel small. Marvellous.

[dragonwhishes.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something, but now I don't think I can compare to what you wrote.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Seconded. I can just wander open-jawed while looking up, getting hit by cars, walking into lampposts, and so on forever. Good skyscrapers are plain awesome.

Toronto.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I feel dizzy and headachey when I look up at a fourteen story buildings. Skyscrapers would probably give me migraines

[camwyn]

Heh. To each his or her own, I suppose. I work on the 29th floor of a ... I think this building has forty floors, though I may be wrong. I also get rapturous over the sheer engineering of the Pulaski Skyway at times, but since that's an elevated highway, that's a matter of either 'looking at from far away' or 'looking around while at the great height already' rather than looking up or down.

[batyatoon]

*proud small-child voice* MY town.