Empire of Signs
Deconstructing an American icon
By Phillip Lopate | From Preservation | September/October 2006
Nearest Thing to Heaven:
The Empire State Building and American Dreams
By Mark Kingwell
Yale University Press, $26
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There have been many books on the engineering and construction of the Empire State Building, but this latest, by Mark Kingwell, is about its evolving place in our dreams and imagination. Arguing that the destruction of the World Trade Center "ushered in a new moment of appreciation for those tall buildings of New York that were still standing," the author sets out to rescue the Empire State Building from mere nostalgia and deconstruct the multiple meanings of this cultural icon, and of cultural icons in general. A tall order; by and large he succeeds.
Kingwell, the author of eight previous books and a frequent contributor to magazines, writes playfully and well. He does amusing riffs on Fay Wray and King Kong, Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and Andy Warhol's Empire. He captures the special poignancy of the Empire State Building, its combination of grandeur and shabbiness, monumentality and financial underachievement. Because it was built not to advertise a single lordly client, like the Chrysler Building, but as a speculative real estate venture, meant to demonstrate can-do confidence in the teeth of the Depression, it had trouble from the start achieving full occupancy. The many thousands of visitors who line up daily, waiting to get to the observation deck, seem often to forget the building's continuing occupation by small businesses, lawyers, dentists, jewelers, garment center companies, and even, Kingwell fantasizes, the occasional private eye.
Not a signature building by an auteur architect, it has for that reason been all the more adaptable as a universal symbol of both New York City and America, seeming to spring from the collective unconscious of its era. "It is the spirit of the century, indeed of the American triumph," writes Kingwell, "realized in tempered Pennsylvania steel, Indiana limestone, and the peculiar jazz of homegrown American style, an unimprovable combination of classical proportions and moderne sleekness."
Happily, the author succeeds in sustaining a viewpoint toward the Empire State that is "always affectionate," as he puts it. But he cannot forbear moralizing rather far afield about the demonic forces that have combined elsewhere with technology. In fact, much of this book-length essay is given over to familiar digressions about the dark side of architecture—its relations to totalitarianism and capitalist commodification—as though the author were impatient with the building itself and eager to turn over the rocks of "empire" in Empire State for any reptiles underneath. The subtitle or subtext might as well be: Why We Are in Iraq.
Kingwell, who is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, employs an aphoristic approach that grows directly out of European theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. These are all wonderful thinkers, generously cited by him, but there is a kind of Greatest Hits of Cultural Theory synthesis to the enterprise. Though Jean Baudrillard—who famously argued that the simulated copy, or "simulacrum," of a thing eclipses the original—is never mentioned by name, the simulacral ghost haunts the proceedings in the reiteration of how "invisible" a cultural icon like the Empire State Building becomes, how "diminished" it is by endless photographic representation. He finally, wittily acknowledges: "The point of this extended exercise in epistemology is not, as people often suppose, to deny the reality of the building. Such a thing could hardly be done when the building is, after all, right here; certainly it would be a good day for philosophical reflection if it were ever that powerful." While it is comforting to be told the author knows his subject exists on the material plane, it is fatiguing to have to arrive so laboriously at such a commonsense conclusion.
The larger problem is that the fashionable academic prose style Kingwell has mastered boxes him into a reductionist, political-scold corner: His epigrammatic syntax betrays him into a series of "X is nothing more than a cover for Y" pronouncements. There is something heroic about his struggles to wriggle out of this conspiratorial trap by repeating from time to time that things are more complicated, or that the Empire State is not only an icon of surveillance and technological oppression but also "of liberation, of possibility." We are left with the unsurprising if scrupulous idea that the truth of the building accrues over time from the sum of its uses and representations, "the entire palimpsest of history." Yes—isn't that assumed?
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Phillip Lopate is the author of Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now.
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