&gt;No building style better represented America’s industriousness, monomaniacal greed, disregard of tradition, and eagerness to attempt feats that more established cultures considered obscene. And while those indelicate traits prompted Americans to develop the skyscraper...<p>The article is good, but that tainted my view. Cheap edginess is intellectually lazy, not to mention those &quot;cultural traits&quot; have nothing to do with why the first very tall buildings were in the US.