Last one to leave the skyscraper, please turn out the lights
When is the big crash going to come in China? Various indicators suggest trouble but perhaps the most significant one is the Skyscraper Index. First formulated by Andrew Lawrence in 1999, the theory suggests that the projection of vainglorious tall buildings immediately precedes major business crises. China is working on the world’s three highest skyscrapers. The biggest, in Shanghai, with 94 storeys and at 1,509 feet (260 higher than the Empire State), is not due for completion until 2012. But, according to the theory, completion dates tend to come after the crash. Thus the Chrysler Building was conceived and designed in 1929, and the groundbreaking ceremony was 19 September that year. Wall Street’s ‘Black Tuesday’ was 29 October 1929, seven months before 28 May 1930 when the Chrysler Building opened and officially became ‘the World’s tallest building’. The Empire State, 25 storeys and 150 feet higher than the Chrysler, was also conceived before the crash but not completed until 1931: it was years before all the storeys were let.
Recent research, reported in the spring issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (which is, incidentally, by far the best publication of its kind I read), suggests the theory is more accurate than when Lawrence first touted it. The World Trade Center (1,368 feet) and the Sears Tower (1,450 feet), from 1972–4, signalled the 1970s stagflation, as did the 1997 Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur (1,463 feet) the collapse of the East Asian economies. Indeed Malaysia’s prosperity has never been the same since the Petronas reared its ugly twin heads. As with the Empire State, by the time they were completed the crisis had begun.
Behind the theory lies the truth that humans are highly emotional creatures, much less guided by reason than they suppose. Business cycles reflect the parabolas of the manicdepressive. J.M. Keynes always used to say that what made economics work was, essentially, ‘animal high spirits’, and they could turn to low spirits with unpredictable speed. In general, I have noted, large and ostentatious buildings are a warning sign. When I was writing my history of ancient Egypt I was struck by the coincidences between the hubris of the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs and the incipient decline of the Old Kingdom. The pharaohs had been building pyramids for centuries, but the prideful monsters set up by Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus were indications of overconfidence. Depression set in under the Fifth Dynasty.
There are, indeed, many examples from antiquity of how extravagant public-building programmes preceded, even if they did not precipitate, the eclipse of a civilisation, especially in ancient Babylon, Assyria and the Hittite empire. King David did not build; his son Solomon did, and the decline followed his death. Athens was never the same after the Acropolis went up, and the decline of Achaemenid Persia followed not long after Darius (reigned 521–486 BC) built his vast and self-congratulatory capital of Persepolis, which was in due course looted and burned by Alexander in 331 BC. Once, wandering among the ruins of Diocletian’s colossal palace in what is now Croatia, I reflected that it was in his reign that the inflation which was to destroy the Roman empire first established its fatal grip. That great monarch, Edward I, never exercised the same authority after he embarked on his colossal castle building in north Wales. It is a pointer that the most successful of the Plantagenets, Henry V, never put one stone on top of another; whereas his son Henry VI, who built Eton and King’s, Cambridge, lost his kingdom.
Who builds high, falls hard — look at Wolsey and his Hampton Court. Henry VIII built fantastically at Nonesuch, and lost all his wars. Elizabeth built nothing, and won them all. Look at the magnificent châteaux the Valois put up — and look how they ended up, in syphilis and ruin. Their successor, Henri IV, contented himself with a useful bridge still there, in perfect working order — and became France’s greatest king. And mark the sorry tale of Louis XIV. He did well in the early years of his personal rule: won battles, conquered provinces, made himself loved. Then hubris set in: he was bitten by the Versailles bug. He built and built and built, and the palace grew longer and longer. As it grew, his fortunes declined and by the time it was the largest palace in the world, they had collapsed in defeat and bankruptcy. Meanwhile, by a blessed providence, Charles II’s plans to emulate Louis and build a Versailles in Winchester came to nothing, or rather ended up as a mere barracks. His successors mercifully did little or nothing. Indeed under William III Whitehall Palace burned down and was never replaced, and Queen Anne lived in a hugger-mugger way. But all the time England prospered.
The theory might be carried on into modern times. Napoleon III’s rebuilding of Paris adumbrates the collapse of his regime — the grandes boulevardes led nowhere but to the fatal field of Sedan. Hitler planned his grandiose New Berlin with his architect Speer — including the world’s largest dome — in 1941, the year he made all his decisive mistakes. And where did the Stalinallee lead? To oblivion: we do not even know where Stalin’s grave is. A more recent example is the colossal building schemes of François Mitterrand of France — les grands travaux as he called them. Hitherto, France had flourished under de Gaulle, who built nothing and lived in a modest little château he had inherited. But the grands travaux — library, opera house and all — proved failures and there is now a plan to demolish the glass pyramids with which the old rascal disfigured the Louvre. This building coincided with the period when the economic decline of France, now accelerating, first set in.
As it happens, long before the skyscraper theory, there was an adage in Fleet Street that moving into a grand new building was always a bad omen for a publication. Once Hulton House opened, it was not long before Picture Post went down and the whole Hulton empire sank without trace. The opening of the new Mirror building at Holborn Circus was the prelude to the decline of ‘the world’s greatest newspaper’. There was a clue at the time in the megalomania of Cecil King, who discovered, when the edifice was almost complete, that there was no coal fire in his chairman’s office, and insisted one be put in at the then huge cost of £20,000. Soon King was sacked and, in due course, the Mirror fell into the clutches of ‘Cap’n Bob’. It was from the roof of this illomened pile that he set off by helicopter on his last trip to ignominy. And who now occupies the other paper palaces, built in pride and evacuated in embarrassment — Beaverbrook’s Black Glass Lubianka, and the citadel of the Berrys with its fourth-floor lawn? Shall we soon see the Chinese dragon similarly humbled?
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