Impossible Heights

Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder

2014
Author:

Adnan Morshed

A rich exploration of the influence of skyscrapers, airplanes, and aerial vision on interwar American visual culture

Demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular “superman” discourses of the time, Adnan Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Impossible Heights is an original account of the American fascination with the skyscraper and the airplane and the enthusiasm for the new perspective on high from which people surveyed the city and landscape. Adnan Morshed examines the intersections between intellectual biography, visuality, and cultural history and brings together the ‘art of architecture’ with mass culture and spectatorship. In doing so, he illuminates ‘the aesthetics of ascension’ as a widely shared cultural phenomenon that characterized the interwar period.

Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York

The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and ‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights

Adnan Morshed is associate professor of architecture and architectural history at the Catholic University of America.

Impossible Heights is an original account of the American fascination with the skyscraper and the airplane and the enthusiasm for the new perspective on high from which people surveyed the city and landscape. Adnan Morshed examines the intersections between intellectual biography, visuality, and cultural history and brings together the ‘art of architecture’ with mass culture and spectatorship. In doing so, he illuminates ‘the aesthetics of ascension’ as a widely shared cultural phenomenon that characterized the interwar period.

Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York

A valuable contribution to the tradition of scholarship on aerial perspective and the history of visuality by focusing upon the interwar period and the American fascination with aviation and skyscrapers.

CHOICE

Impossible Heights. . . offers a site of rich cultural exploration regarding the architectural history of flight.

Science Fiction Studies

Impossible Heights is driven by extensive archival research presented in clear, accessible prose capable of engaging architectural historians as well as readers intrigued by the twentieth century’s unquenchable reach for the skies. In a fascinating read that is enhanced with over a hundred images, Morshed’s Impossible Heights brings to life this period of spectacular vision for the American metropolis.

Journal of American Studies

UMP blog: How early aviation inspired American utopianism

A hundred years have passed since the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service. In Florida, on January 1, 1914, a Benoist XIV airboat flew from St. Petersburg to Tampa with one paid passenger. The distance was a mere 23 miles across the bay, but it was an epoch-making event, ushering in the age of commercial flight.