1) There is something suggestive about the construction of buildings in American culture and society. Just as churches once raised the highest towers of the city, we see wealthy individuals use skyscrapers as egotistical personal and corporate symbols at the peak of every cycle.
2) As historian David Nye wrote in his book, American Technological Sublime, “To experience either the jagged skyline in the distance, the immense vistas aloft, or the insect life of the streets below validates that power.”
3) In 1913, the 792-foot Woolworth Building, known then as the “Cathedral of Commerce,” became the tallest in the world. A year later, there was a global financial crisis. The biggest gold outflow as World War I broke out imperiled America’s ability to repay its debts abroad. 
4) The dollar plummeted and the New York Stock Exchange was shut for over four months to prevent the Europeans from selling their US securities and demanding gold in return. There was an unexpected run on Uncle Sam’s bank.
5) By the late 1920’s, there was another race to build the tallest building in Manhattan. Walter Chrysler secretly built a 185-foot spire to bring the height of the Chrysler Building to 1,046 feet. The spire, called “Vertex,” was hoisted into place on October 23, 1929.
6) That same day, Yale economist Irving Fisher jubilantly declared, “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression was the worst in the history of the industrialized world.
7) In 1972, the Transamerica Corporation debuted the city’s tallest Transamerica Building. What followed was a collapse in the high-flying Nifty Fifty growth stocks and the vicious 1973-74 bear market, the worst ever since the Great Depression.
8) As I travelled through the Bay Area last week, I noticed that the San Francisco skyline has changed once again. The 1,070-feet Salesforce Tower is now the city’s tallest structure. Salesforce is San Francisco’s largest private employer.
9) At the opening last May, the building was christened as a symbol of “transformational optimism” that “courageously reaches up to the clouds” and creates a “seamless connection between heaven and earth.” Salesforce Tower is the church of our time.
10) San Francisco has also beat out Manhattan as America’s priciest commercial rent market. If technology has become the god of our modern age, as Jos de Mul once said, I guess it only makes sense for the longtime cradle of the tech industry to carry the most expensive price tag.
11) Make of it what you will.
