Skyscrapers are costing the Earth

The sky-high club ... Hong Kong's office buildings. Photograph: Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty

Perhaps it was the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright who brought the first skyscraper age to a gloriously absurd halt. A little over 50 years ago, Wright drew up plans for the Illinois, a mile-high skyscraper for Chicago.

His argument was, well, why not? Given the advanced state of US steel construction and glass technologies in the 1950s, maybe it really was possible to build so very high, three times higher in fact than the Empire State Building, for many years the tallest building in the world.

Getting people to the topmost floors of the Illinois was one of the few real challenges facing Wright. Just how many elevators would the tower need, and how would they work? No problems here for old Frankie; he suggested, blithely, that they should be nuclear-powered.

I don't know about you, but I would be less than mustard keen to step into an atomic lift and be blasted skywards by the same force that obliterated Hiroshima and polluted vast swaths of Russia and Scandinavia when Chernobyl blew.

Maybe, Wright was teasing with his designs for the tallest skyscraper of all. Perhaps he was saying, come on everyone, surely we've reached the limit, the end game of skyscraper construction. We might well be able to reach ever further into the heavens through architectural means, but what's the point? Leave space exploration to astronauts and rockets.

This remains a valid doubt half a century on, at a time when scores of cities around the world are investing, or indulging, in steel and glass towers as never before. The new skyscraper age has yet to produce anything near as tall as the Illinois, but the sheer number of new architect-designed towers is mind-boggling.

This essentially 1920s, or 1930s, conceit has been revived to the point of the truly absurd. For not only are very many designs for the latest wave of skyscrapers from Britain to China unadulterated kitsch, each tower trying to sing more loudly than its neighbour, but these gas-guzzling behemoths are environmentally very unfriendly. They are without doubt the SUVs of architecture.

They are in danger of spoiling long cherished views of familiar city landmarks; the cluster of Shanghai-inspired skyscrapers, beloved of Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, is not simply old-fashioned, kitsch, but, according to a report today, are threatening the Tower of London's status as a World Heritage site.

There is, of course, a case for high-rise design in cities where land is at a premium, and another for saying that towers can, in the right conditions, help to contain urban sprawl.

But it can be argued that the taller a building is, the greater is its hunger for lifts, air-conditioning, power and water. As it rises ever higher, so the amount of usable floor space diminishes. Towers are, very often, wasteful luxuries, like whirlpool baths or 4WD town cars decked out with all the chic accoutrements and electronic gadgets of limousines.

There are examples of skyscrapers that are almost "green", including designs by Norman Foster and Ken Yeang, whose opinions we have solicited below on this subject. Even then, when I asked Yeang recently if a skyscraper could ever really be "green", his answer was a simple and direct "no." And, as he has written in his rigorous new book Ecodesign, "tall buildings are particularly unecological . . . research has also shown that they take 30% more embodied energy to build." Elsewhere he notes that "in the 50-year life-cycle of a typical commercial skyscraper, the building's energy costs are at 34% and more of the total costs." Now, that's gas-guzzling on an epic scale.

If we were rational creatures, we would have abandoned the skyscraper with the unrealised plans for The Illinois half a century ago. As we are anything but rational, expect towers to reach for the stratosphere even as the oil runs out. Oh, and if you think it's just architects and their egomaniacal clients to blame, consider this disturbing fact from Yeang's book; "the average internal temperature of homes was about 13C in the UK in 1970 whereas the average headed towards 19C in 2004. We simple can't enough heating (or, in tropical 2006, its converse, cooling), can't use enough precious fuel. So even if skyscrapers fail to suck up what fossil fuel remains for buildings, our low-rise suburban homes will gobble up the rest.