If you looked south from Central Park in New York City at any time in the last decade and knew a few things about both architectural and financial history, you would be correct to feel a certain sense of dread. The crowding of supertall “pencil towers” — often containing a single apartment per floor — has been one of the more grotesque indications of the extreme inequalities of our century. Many of these towers are only partly inhabited, and the units on the higher floors sway so sharply in the wind that they’re apparently acutely uncomfortable to live in anyway.

But this isn’t necessarily why you’d have felt such trepidation. The tallest residential building in the world, Central Park Tower, completed in 2020, stands right at the foot of the park. It’s now the tallest building in the western hemisphere, if you ignore the gratuitous spike on top of One World Trade Center. Yet a tallest building record usually only means one thing: there’s going to be a financial crash any minute now — a method of prediction nicknamed the “skyscraper index.” And sure enough, when Central Park Tower was receiving its first residents, COVID-19 sent the stock markets into meltdown.

The first building to give credence to the skyscraper index — leaving aside the Tower of Babel — was the Empire State Building back in 1931. It was a gratuitously, pointlessly tall building, reaching the height it did solely to be taller than the previous record holder, the Chrysler Building, opened the year before. The crowding of incredibly tall towers into the Midtown Manhattan grid happened at the peak of the financial “exuberance” that culminated in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, though the length of time it took to build meant that some of the towers were actually opening at the moment of meltdown. This was the case with the Empire State Building, which was such a failure at first that it was nicknamed the Empty State Building. Rather tellingly, the New Deal and Great Society eras made no attempt to eclipse the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, with no edifice coming close in the 1940s, ’50s, or ’60s. It was only in the ’70s, as finance, insurance, and real estate began their advance to command the American economy, that towers began to reach and surpass these heights.

The two buildings in question, the Sears Tower in Chicago and the World Trade Center in New York, were not only the world’s tallest in quick succession; they were also expressions of a new obnoxiousness and aggression within American capital. They made little in the way of concessions to conventional beauty, romance, or the picturesque. Instead they made for chilling icons of machine-made domination in disaster movies and action films of the era. But the skyscraper index is an international phenomenon, and the world’s tallest building hasn’t been found in the United States since the late 1990s. Yet the principle still applies.

The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were a product of the speculative mania that precipitated the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997; so too was their successor, Taipei 101 in Taiwan — completed in the early 2000s, construction had begun at the time of the crash in 1997. The world’s current tallest building is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Planned as the Burj Dubai, upon completion in 2010 it was widely seen as a monument to the financial surrealism that preceded the 2008 crisis, and it was pointedly renamed after Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, who had to bail out Dubai when the more famous emirate faced a financial meltdown. The failure to learn anything from the 2008 crash or to properly divest from fossil fuels is symbolized by the construction, well underway at the time of writing, of the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which, when completed, will be perhaps the most malevolent of all the “world’s tallest” — a kilometer-high monument to the power of the consummate petrostate.

Skyscrapers are a wholly capitalist invention and a totally American one. Their technology has its roots in Victorian Britain (the cellular, mass-produced metal frame structure of Liverpool’s Oriel Chambers) and in the French Third Republic (the modular construction and unprecedented height of the Eiffel Tower), but more is owed to American patterns of land use, with all those tightly parceled-out colonial grids; to an unskilled, recently arrived workforce; and to a national talent for gratuitous waste and irrationality. These are best observed in the skylines of cities like Dallas and Phoenix, where a cluster of sixty-story towers suddenly gives way to single-story houses, surface car parking, and endless roads. But socialists have sometimes found these structures inspiring and experimented with imaginary towers, like Vladimir Tatlin’s famed, unbuilt Monument to the Third International in Saint Petersburg. Even the Sears Tower owes some credit to the Soviet Union — it closely resembles an early 1920s student project for a skyscraper produced at the “Soviet Bauhaus,” Vkhutemas.

If you went looking for an alternative skyscraper, you could find it in Eastern Europe. After 1945, Joseph Stalin decreed the construction of seven ornate high-rises in a ring around the center of Moscow, modeled after the American towers of the Gilded Age. These are largely evil monuments to Stalinist despotism, but they have an unusual cousin in Warsaw, Poland: the Palace of Culture and Science, completed in 1955, which was the tallest skyscraper between Moscow and New York until 1990. The palace was an unwanted gift from the USSR, clearly designed to impose Soviet aesthetics on a recalcitrant satellite state. It had a Soviet architect and was con-structed by Soviet builders. But Polish Communists insisted that, unlike any skyscraper that came before, it be a completely open, public building. So within what looks like a combination of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan, a hypertrophied Kremlin, and a Polish Renaissance town hall, flanked by statues of burly workers and peasants, is a swimming pool, a children’s leisure center, a multiplex cinema, a theater, two bars, a concert hall that once hosted (in the Communist era, no less) Leonard Cohen and the Rolling Stones, a museum of evolution, a museum of technology, and a popular viewing platform. By now it’s an icon of the city; its roots in Stalinism are increasingly ignored or even forgotten among young Poles. It stands as an exemplar of the idea of a noncapitalist skyscraper, where our monuments could be planned and public. The Palace of Culture and Science scrapes the skies, but it also storms the heavens.