"By their height, expense, and status as complex tools for money making, skyscrapers were expressive of the city's prosperity, competitiveness, and the aggressive pursuit of private goals. Here, surely, in these 'hives of business,' was the home of Mammon, unfettered and unalloyed."  -- Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 1991.

The skyscraper captured the aesthetic imagination early, as evidenced in the poem Skyscraper written by Carl Sandburg in 1916:  "By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys...continue." 

Chrysler Building 1920s

 Rockefeller Center, New York City

"In this post cold-war era of 'peace', it is the presence and structure (as well as media-transmitted images) of the building that we are learning to see as the most important symbol of both live and lost causes...continue." - Anthony D. King,1996.