Skyscrapers are human achievements that require innovation in the extraction of land to tower over its neighbors. The third skyscraper future reflects the past imaginary of Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis. This visualization aims to highlight the economic disparities and labor oppression depicted in the film, contrasting them with the modern logics of rentism as embodied by the Shanghai Tower.
The third skyscraper future is understood through the present and potential future of rentism, an economic system that engineers space to earn rent, designating quality of space by class. Fritz Lang interprets the physical manifestation of success in rentier capitalism through The New Tower of Babel—planned and run for technology to maximize abundance and evidence hierarchy in spatial production.
Borne from rentism, the skyscraper commodifies architecture by organizing class by height. The elite, in the spacious penthouse, enjoy opulence and realize returns. The poor, in the dense depths, seek access to personal space and security. The government, the mediator, negotiates a universal basic standard of living through regulation. The latest technology qualifies form and function.
The nature of rentism shifted from an explotative game to arithmetic response as technologies invented since Metropolis replace labor with machines and policy protections apply universally. Integrated cyber-physical systems piloted by artificial intelligence respond to regulatory demands and ensure financial health by modulating profit-maximizing adaptations to stringent and time- and cost-intensive resilience, surveillance, equity, and engagement policies. The resulting skyscrapers are supertall, confined architectures that abstract rent premiums in differential access to light, safety, materiality, home systems, biodiversity, and space.
Evidently, the chaos brought by artificial intelligence unequally impacts stakeholders of rent-seeking architectural typologies. The trajectory of environmental degradation and technological underemployment will determine the extent to which supply-side ceilings threaten their future production.
Methodology
Using the OpenCLIP model, I ranked frames from “Metropolis” based on their depiction of economic status and overlaid them onto the Shanghai Tower to illustrate the modern logics of rentism. This methodology outlines the process of categorizing images based on the spectrum of wealth (from “poverty” to “wealth”) using the CLIP model. The process involves defining multiple labels for the ends of the spectrum, preprocessing images and labels, categorizing images, calculating weighted probabilities, and visualizing the results in a structured manner.
Step-by-Step Process
- Model and Preprocessing Setup:
- Load the CLIP model (“ViT-B/32”) using the clip library.
- Define a preprocessing function to tokenize the labels for the CLIP model.
- Directory and Labels Definition:
- Specify the directory containing the images to be categorized.
- Define multiple labels representing different degrees of the spectrum. For the wealth spectrum, labels include synonyms for both “rich” (e.g., wealthy, affluent) and “poor” (e.g., impoverished, destitute).
- Label Preprocessing:
- Tokenize and concatenate the multiple labels for “rich” and “poor” to form text inputs compatible with the CLIP model.
- Image Categorization:
- Load and preprocess each image using the CLIP model’s preprocessing function.
- Encode the image features using the CLIP model, and encode text features for both rich and poor labels.
- Calculate logits (unnormalized probabilities) for the image with respect to the rich and poor labels, then convert these logits to probabilities using the softmax function.
- Sum the probabilities for the rich and poor labels separately to get a weighted probability indicating the degree of wealth represented by the image.
- Sorting Results:
- Sort the images based on their weighted probabilities, with higher probabilities indicating a stronger association with the “rich” category.
- Visualization:
- Calculate the number of images to be displayed per row and the total number of rows.
- Resize all images to a fixed width and aspect ratio to ensure uniformity in the visualization.
- Plot images in a grid format, spaced appropriately to create a visually appealing layout.
The result was overlaid with an image of the Shanghai Tower blended with a post representation of the New Tower of Babel.
The final poster merges elements from “Metropolis” and the Shanghai Tower into a cohesive visual narrative. The eclectic style, symbolic clock, and contrasting imagery emphasize economic disparities and labor exploitation. The rays of light and shimmering skyscraper highlight rent premiums and capitalist influences, urging reflection on socio-economic hierarchies in urban landscapes.
By selecting and categorizing 105 frames from “Metropolis” that depict various degrees of wealth, and overlaying these images onto the Shanghai Tower, I aimed to create a visual representation of modern rentism. The clock from “Metropolis,” reimagined as the moon, symbolizes labor oppression, with rays of light representing the extraction of value and rent premiums.
This project serves as both an artistic commentary and a critical examination of rentism’s impact on architecture and society. It invites viewers to reflect on the disparities embedded in our skyscrapers and the broader implications of rentism in shaping our cities and lives.
Sources
- Upsplash
- Cosentini Associates, Shanghai Tower
- Inhabit, Shanghai Tower by Gensler
- Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)
- Kian Goh, Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (2020)
- P. Frase, ‘Technology and Ecology as Apocalypse and Utopia’, in Four Futures (Verso, 2016)
- B. Sterling, ‘Unbuilt Towers of Futurity’, in P. Nobel, ed., The Future of the Skyscraper (SOM, 2018)
- T Revell, J. Pickard, G. Voss, ‘Valuing Utopia in Speculative and Critical Design’, in W Davies, ed., Economic Science Fictions (Goldsmiths, 2018)
