The content of the doc is no less carefully constructed than its form. The highrise apartment has long carried a pejorative sentiment amongst academics and critics, not so much for their form or function but how badly they’ve been implemented into the fabric of our cities. The highrise is misunderstood as an architectural form. It has never recovered from Corbusier’s block apartments in a park setting ideology. This is the folly of bad urban planning and a zealous pursuit of misplaced social justice, not the highrise building. Since then we have learned that highrise buildings best serve urban context where life occurs on animated streets that themselves require density for that animation. There is little symbiosis between highrise buildings and suburban settings. I liken this condition to an extended hyper isolation, both horizontal and vertical. Hopefully editions of A Short History of the Highrise will scroll and swipe their way to a better understanding of how sound urban planning and building forms must go hand in hand for a highrise building to be successful, to be aesthetically, ecologically,  and financially sustainable. We need to take a cue from our earliest highrises in ancient Rome where mixed use buildings were practically built for the polity in service of street life or from the town of Shibam in Yemen, where an exceptional, strange beauty and sustainability can be found in a dense highrise building environment that is centuries old.

The Producers of A Short History of the Highrise in its final 8 minute segment give us a romantic but genuine sense of how many highrise dwellers find beauty and meaning in their homes in places as far away and diverse as Tokyo, Chicago and Vancouver — the debate is no longer about coming together in denser conditions but how living space is being redefined by the ubiquitous highrise buildings that now line our cities; and with good urban planning,  well designed highrise buildings just may be our deliverance. Written and directed by Katerina Cizek, A Short History of the Highrise in its full convergence operation is now available on line though the New York Times Op-Docs.

Alfredo Romano

“A Short History of the Highrise” is an interactive documentary that explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world. The centerpiece of the project is four short films. The first three (“Mud,” “Concrete” and “Glass”) draw on The New York Times’s extraordinary visual archives, a repository of millions of photographs that have largely been unseen in decades. Each film is intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation. The fourth chapter (“Home”) is comprised of images submitted by the public.”

NFB Canada