"When I go back to Frankfurt and walking the streets, I see and live the fact that half of the city was destroyed in the war: there is a villa, then a barracks, a skyscraper and maybe another villa.
They belong to another history of urbanisation, one that is as universal and ubiquitous as the skyscraper, only much older.
Its jointly owned Walkie Talkie skyscraper in the City of London has focussed the sun's rays so that they have melted car parts and bicycles, while the government said it would review its plans to develop Royal Dutch Shell's headquarters, despite a green light from local authorities.
The debate centred over whether the 408ft steel structure on top of the New York skyscraper was a spire or an antenna.
Such has been the effect of Oxford's new Castle Mill student housing development on the edge of Port Meadow, a group of bulky blocks that despoil the landscape and block the long-cherished view, in a move slammed by critics as like "building a skyscraper next to Stonehenge".
It showed a buyer flying into London on a private jet, driving to the skyscraper in a Bentley and buying an apartment as a surprise gift for his girlfriend as if it was a piece of "curving glass sculpture".
But with "human skyscraper" Pym and the others there's a difficulty: the so-called "subject editor" posts were designed for BBC grandees or journalistic giants from elsewhere, not (although the rule is sometimes broken) everyone-moves-up-one internal promotion.
Only a five-minute cab ride from the skyscraper, a heaving crowd of thousands of pro-democracy protesters stood outside the Central Government Offices calling out "Beijing" and asserting their rights to the city.
Although, in the big scheme of things, it's not exactly a car driving through a skyscraper.
A skyscraper seems every builder's dream.
They find that in all countries GDP per person and skyscraper height are "cointegrated", a fancy way of saying that the two things track each other.
