From ascetic individualism to the dissolution of the self: A sociological approach to the religious symbolism of Chicago and New York skyscrapers

Abstract

This article seeks to determine the link between the symbolic profile of North American skyscrapers and the features of North American culture, emphasizing the parallelism followed in the evolution of both. For this purpose, it resorts to a comprehensive or interpretative sociology combined with an incipient sociology of skyscrapers as a theoretical–methodological basis, complemented in turn with the notions of creativity and symbolism, resources through which the nuclear myths on which North American culture is sustained would become visible. The work reveals how the transformations in the style followed by American skyscrapers maintain a close relationship with the process of collapse of the original values proclaimed by American capitalism. So that the aesthetics characterized by a rationalist abstraction, perfectly fitted in the inaugural ascetic values of this first capitalism, would give way to an aesthetics of evanescent sign where an individuated consideration of the self would be given preeminence. In this sense, the work discovers how the symbology carried on the skyscrapers constitutes a first-level observatory in order to evidence the mutations that took place in the North American religiosity.