Hegau Tower in Singen, Germany by JAHN

Read the Skyscraper Typology here

For all the japes of Postmodernism and the contortions of the icon builders, the High Modernist skyscraper, exemplified by the postwar work of Mies and Gordon Bunshaft, continues to sprout across the world’s cities. The completely filled envelope is after all the cheapest way to maximise land values. This has resulted in some parsimonious and unimaginative design, and the reaction of those who seek distinction in the most simple-minded way possible, but as Ada Louise Huxtable put it, ‘the Miesian skyscraper is a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house’.

The challenge is to do it as carefully as Mies, and here Helmut Jahn – more known for his leaden flourishes – has chosen the route of quiet but exquisite sophistication. Jahn takes the transparency posited by Mies’s early projects to a new extreme of lucidity. The grid of the facade, enlivened by metallic exterior shutters on its southern side, passes beyond the structure into space, joining the taller and lower buildings and suggesting – as Rosalind Krauss said of Mondrian’s works – an infinite extensibility, without extravagant height.