An individualism without individuals. A sociological approach to the capitalist symbolism of Chicago and New York skyscrapers

Abstract

Starting from Comprehensive or Interpretive Sociology and the Sociology of skyscrapers, this article proposes as basic objectives to verify how the North American economic culture is showed in the symbolism of the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York and to verify the parallelism between the formal evolution of these buildings and the main economic transformations that have occurred in North American society in recent decades. In short, we will try to highlight the following symbolic questions: if the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York represent the defense of an American business culture marked by strong competitiveness and individualism; if they express the aesthetic transition from a capitalist rationalist architecture to another aesthetic where fiction, fantasy and spectacularity prevail; if this process is in tune with the transformation from an industrial capitalism to another of consumption and if it manifests itself through the decline of rationalist structural architectural elements towards others marked by glass, lightness, fluidity, liquidity and commodification; if the individualism that characterizes North American capitalism has also mutated in recent decades, that is, if from a primitive exaltation of autonomy as a core value of society, it drifts towards the cult of an individualized, privatized self disconnected from public space. Ultimately, it is about confirming the sociological utility of skyscrapers, understood as symbolic, economic, social and cultural objects.