Writing 

The architect had designed the skyscraper to shame the older buildings below. Its vantage point gave the viewer an inevitable superiority of gaze that deceptively flattened the surrounding landscape into nothing more than jagged, concrete ground cover. The regularity of it all purposefully recalled the singularly unobtrusive silence and infinitely wide plains of the architect’s monotonous, midwestern childhood. In this new wilderness, nature was not lost but merely transformed.

 

The golden-grain tints of wheat fields seemed overlaid upon the aging city in streaks of brown, yellow, and grey dirt that rose from the ground during windstorms and dripped down walls in the intermittent rains. Only the windows of the skyscraper remained unsullied by the mechanics of the city’s daily routines. On a clear day, observers could see all the way to the ocean and the islands beyond.

 

Looking out from the 51st floor to ceiling windows, the architect prided himself in having created a place of such defeated liberation. He felt charitable knowing that the vast openness of the landscape suggested every possibility of invention for the skyscraper’s tenants. More importantly, he felt safe knowing the tenants remained walled off from actual interaction with such hypothetical freedom by the thick-paned glass windows they worshiped as welcome captors in their well-defined, right-angled world.