Why we’re obsessed with building cities in the sky – from medieval Bologna to modern-day Manchester

Whether it’s the opening of Vegas’s tallest hotel, or the announcement of a new tower in the North, highrise design is back. But, asks Jonathan Glancey, what does the trend really tell us about how we live now and what we value as important?

Crowds admire the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, in Dubai (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Pisa-like, Garisenda Tower in Bologna, built around 1100 for a family of Ghibelline money changers, has been leaning for a very long while. Dante made a passing reference to it in Inferno, written in the second decade of the 14th century: “As when one sees the tower called Garisenda from underneath its leaning side, and then a cloud passes over and it seems to lean the more.”

The towers of Garisenda (left) and Asinelli in Bologna (De Agostini/Getty)

Since October, the Garisenda Tower has been cordoned off. The city council fears it has finally leant too far and may well be on the point of collapse. Because it rises from the heart of the old city with buildings all around, not least the equally venerable and even taller Asinelli Tower, its fall could be catastrophic. No one, though it seems, wants the tower to go. Plans are afoot to shore it up in a long and costly renovation project. Bologna – La Turrita, the city of towers – is fond of its 20 or so remaining medieval “skyscrapers” of which in Dante’s day it boasted as many as 80 and perhaps even 100. The Bologna of 800 years ago might be seen as a medieval Manhattan or, should I say, Manchester.