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A call for a positive approach to tall buildings


Beetham Tower, Old Hall St, Liverpool [click to enlarge]

A city skyline dominated by tall buildings can always catch your breath and, even in isolation, always have some magic about them, whether it be at night, with their random geometric patterns of light suspended in the sky or when they give substance to anotherwise flat scene of low rooves and TV aerials!

Tall buildings signify to the world that the city has big business, it infers confidence that the city is a good place to be (all those skyscrapers, something dynamic must be going on!)

Tall buildings provide the environment to house multi department, space hungry large employers - gracefully and efficiently

Tall buildings enable the greatest amount of activity to be generated in each urban site, street, block and district

The skylines they create (when there are enough of them) are always striking, and more often than not, beautiful...much more so than the bland, monotonous dirge of the uniform corniceline!

Tall buildings provide a contemporary resonance to the city landscape and skyline. St Paul's indicated that 18th century London was a vibrant metropolis, the Liver Building said Liverpool was a vibrant metropolis of the early 20th century...how will we spell out to the world our 21st century role?

Tall buildings are great!

Our downtown needs to create depth of field. Right now downtown can sometimes be mistaken for a Hollywood back-lot, as if the waterfront buildings where artificial facias, nothing but desert behind them. Liverpool has a grand setting and even the most substantial buildings set back from the immediate waterfront district would not make much impact, so we must go large!

Liverpool's current skyline composition has come about purely incidentally and has served us perfectly adequately, so why not continue this tried and trusted approach?

downtown from formby beach

Skyscrapers and other tall buildings, of course, do not respond to an absolute need, though there is the case for efficient use of city land, it is an unashamed desire to have them, to WANT them to grace the city and its skyline. We should make no mistake about this. Often you hear people trying to justify tall buildings in terms of a necessary 'evil' in the city. We should not do this...we should be unequivocal in the reasons as to why we should have skyscrapers in Liverpool...we WANT them and we LOVE them!

They bring grace to a city that a series of cornice lines never can...they enable the city to provide what ever it wants and can, the city can grow and change over time and there is no problem. If it generates more activity than can be housed on 6, 10, 20 floors then it just continues up! Why turn away wealth? Cities that like, welcome and promote skyscrapers are usually those same cities with a reputation for fun, dynamism and enterprise...this is no co-incidence...those cities that are precious and have an overblown sense of the importance of their buildings and 'landscapes' are usually prissy, mean hearted and pretentious places...nothing like Liverpool!

Another valuable factor in supporting tall buildings is, of course, that when the economy can provide the clientele, then the higher storeys of tall buildings produce the most valuable real estate! Taller makes it easier to induce the pickier inward investors, the sort that like their office suites high quality, high kudos, HIGH UP!

An Opportunity for Liverpool?

The British display an idiomatic mistrust of cities and loathing of tall buildings. Liverpool, however never has, and could be uniquely positioned to become the UK's sole example of a global, hi-rise, waterfront City - merely by embracing contemporary urbanism and encouraging taller buildings. It has the waterfront setting to maiximise their positive impact.

Liverpool's cultural independence and isolationism from mainstream commercial and political thought in the UK is legend and resulted in many of the problems we associate with the city's governance of the 1980's. But let's not forget that for over 200 years this was the very reason why Liverpool, as an edge-city prospered so extraordinarily. Never provincial, nor deferential...always internationalist.

From its decisions to build its own enclosed dock sysyem, its invention of futures trading, its support of the Amercian Confederacy - Liverpool took risks, took the lead, ignored London.

Its built environment too is a patchwork of organic commercial development.This is no Barcelona or Edinburgh, the city has never been masterplanned. Its keynote buildings the product of brute commerce, looking westward to the Americas. So much for European Capital of Culture.

Most importantly, the current planning ideologies of heritage landscapes and sightline, preservation (or diminution) of rooflines have no truck in Liverpool. They are a product of the English love affair with the past and a fear of change and progress. Liverpudlians are sentimental too, but don't confuse this with a desire to pickle the city in aspic. Theirs is intense civic pride and an aspiration for the city to be international in stature, check out the poll at the Echo website citing Pride as by far the key benefit of 2008 as evidence of this. go

So when it comes to building. Let's Build Big, loosen the chains, let this great city take off again. Liverpool has a unique window and cultural pedigree to be that exciting little bit of Manhattan in 'ye olde Englande'.

Recent developments like the 30 story Beetham Tower have have been absorbed so seamlessly into the grain of the city that in many places you can't even glimpse it - but in its waterfront setting its scale seems entirely appropriate, many say too conservative, a cue to go taller and better.

The 328ft twin towers of the Unity Development now on site at only 22 stories will be even taller due to the lay of the land, but to most cities outisde of the UK many of which you may have never even heard of (Makati, Shenzen, Kaohsiung) these are only the mid-heights of their downtowns.

Liverpool really could grow a cityscape to rival New York, San Francisco or Hong Kong aesthetically, and of course if Liverpool where to get these buildings it will have meant a fundamental breakthrough had been made in the economy, generating the level of growth to command them. To aspire to have tall buildings means being free to develop the economy to a level that may justify them.

To reject, on principle, tall buildings, means making tough decisions about rejecting the economic activity, job creation and wealth that leads to tall buidings being proposed, unless, of course, you opt instead for comprehensive redevelopment, clearing whole areas of old buildings and streetscapes to accomodate the same floor-space, but spread in low rise schemes? That would surely not be the right way for Liverpool, simply in order to impose a new cornice-line definition to the city that has no historic resonance or tradition?

But as a glimpse into a what COULD be for Liverpool.. An ocean-facing port, with a waterfront of new, towering confident buildings and more importnatly a city teeming with people. Built whilst the rest of the UK wrangles over regional capitals, conservation battles and provincialism.

© 2004 Downtown Liverpool Organisation