The Anachronistic Quality of the Word Skyscraper

He went outside and crossed the avenue, then turned and faced the building where he lived. he felt contiguous with it. It was eighty-nine stories, a prime number, in an undistinguished sheath of hazy bronze glass. They shared an edge or boundary, skyscraper and man. It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. He liked it for this reason. He liked to stand and look at it when he felt this way. He felt wary, drowsy and insubstantial. 

The wind came cutting of the river. He took out his hand organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper. No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born. 

The tower gave him strength and depth. 

—Cosmopolis, by Don Delillo, 2003

Although the book doesn't name the building explicitly, the description of the world's tallest residential building, on First Avenue in Manhattan, means it can only be the Trump World Tower.

photos ©2011  Bauzeitgeist.