♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ MAN: By day, the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun, and has a soul.

Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it, and they mingle among its twenty floors, and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies, and valleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls, so poured in and out all day, that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.

What gives a building soul?

Because the architect, in designing it, gave it soul.

Thought about the scale, and the elements.

The humanistic modulation, so to speak.

We look at it in wonder and want to go in it.

WESTON CLARK: A skyscraper is something that we see every day, but we never really think about.

Writers show people that thing that they see every day, and then give it a soul, so that people, like, look at it in a different light.

ROBERT POLITO: It's important to remember that when Sandburg was writing this poem, he was also a journalist.

And there's a real flow back and forth between the poems and the journalism.

ZHANG XIN: I used to see skyscrapers much less with the human context, but the poet himself puts the spirit inside buildings.

ANITA NORMAN: The poem is a story about people.

It's from the perspective of the building, which I think is so interesting.

GEHRY: Sandburg's take on skyscrapers is a lot different than the way I feel about skyscrapers.

Because I'm an architect-- I have to think this way, that there is a body language, and an intent and a humanism in a building that supports the men and women, boys and girls, who pour in.

It's a different way of looking at the skyscraper.

POLITO: I love the opening of the poem, because I think that what you can hear right from the opening line is the kind of double vision of the poem.

"By day, the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul."

When you think of, like, a word like "looms," and the kind of things that loom, it's often shadows that loom, or it's monsters that loom.

Like, there's a hint of menace.

Right away, he's kind of reminding you that this is an industrial landscape, with the words "smoke" as well as the word "sun."

NEW: Carl Sandburg's juxtaposition of "smoke" and "sun" tells us not only that we are in the modern industrial world, but that a Modernist eye is seeing that world.

Technologies-- the airplane, the skyscraper-- have given human beings new vantage points on the natural and the manmade world.

And Modernist artists, architects, and poets are all inventing structures that carve nature into new shapes.

MADELINE LACESNE: In the time that this poem was written, we were industrializing, so it's the sign for human elevation, literally, is the skyscraper.

NEW: Carl Sandburg's early 20th-century Chicago is a laboratory for Modernist composition.

There, nature and the manmade are set in dynamic interaction.

POLITO: When you're on South Michigan, it really looks like you're on the ocean.

There's this huge lake out there that you can't see, of course, to the other side.

And you sort of feel, from your perch, kind of, on the 11th floor, like, you know, "Why did they put this office building, like, right up on the ocean?"

GEHRY: It's the buildings and the context.

Those buildings wouldn't have as much gravitas if they weren't on the lake.

So there's a bigger story there that makes it exciting.

♪ ♪ NEW: Nature was no longer merely setting.

Its power, in collision with the built environment, is now part of the drama.

RAPHEAL MATHIS: "Hour by hour, "the sun and the rain, "the air and the rust, and the press of time "running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it."

GEHRY: You know, there's a rusty bridge as you go in from Kennedy to New York, and it has a beauty-- the steel girders and the rust-- compared to a new bridge.

That beauty comes from?

Nature's work on the bridge, time.

NEW: One of the very first Moderns to appear in Chicago's newly established Poetry magazine, Carl Sandburg wrote poems asserting the turbulence and dissonance of his city.

POLITO: It's very hard for us to think our way back into how shocking these poems would've been.

Dial magazine dismissed them as jargon, said that they weren't poems at all.

Other magazines referred to them as, you know, ugly renderings of ugly things.

NEW: "Elevators slide on their cables, "and tubes catch letters and parcels, "and iron pipes carry gas and water in, and sewage out."

I think he's fascinated by it.

He's fascinated by how it was built, he's fascinated by the mechanics of operating it.

These inventions that came out of the late 19th century that make the building possible.

NEW: "Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words."

GEHRY: His skyscraper is about nuts and bolts, and impersonal engineering, and connections, and the elevators, and the stuff like that.

The cables, the tubes, the wires.

Yeah, which could be the ugliest piece of junk in the world and still be a skyscraper.

Not very poetic material.

But the way he said it-- it was the pipes, the sewage-- I could just see the lines of them, and it feels like moving lines.

POLITO: "Elevators slide on their cables, "and tubes catch letters and parcels, "and iron pipes carry gas and water in, and sewage out."

ZHANG: For poetry, do you isolate certain elements and bring it out in a way that is not usually seen?

When I look at the pipes, if you just line the pipes together, without thinking in the context, by itself, it's beautiful.

NEW: He is trying to assimilate and integrate those mechanical inventions into poetry in a way that they hadn't been there before.

- Oh, absolutely.

- And I do think, maybe, is treating this building as a composition of parts that, like the poem, is art.

POLITO: Right.

CLARK: I began thinking of the skyscraper as a being in itself-- like the mail shooting through tubes, and people wiring... like, phones calling each other in different, like, areas of the skyscraper.

I was kind of reminded of veins.

POLITO: At the same time, though, I mean, he never lets you forget that people died in order to create this building.

I mean, like, when, even in the next stanza where he says, "Hour by hour, the caissons reach down "to the rock of the Earth and hold the building "to a turning planet.

"Hour by hour, the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors."

There is a kind of celebration of these feats of engineering, but what he's referring to is these pneumatic caissons, that, like, in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, resulted in a lot of disease and a lot of deaths.

GEHRY: There's kind of a suffering that goes with it that's almost Calvinist.

You go into this rough environment, you've got to suffer, but then you bring soul to it.

POLITO: I think one of the things that's been forgotten about the Sandburg of this period is that he was a radical Socialist.

This isn't sentimental American Midwestern Socialism.

This is someone who's calling for general strikes and really hoping for a revolution.

There's a contempt for capitalism.

He's making you very aware of the human cost of this kind of economic system.

GEHRY: The Socialist cause is, "Everybody's equal and everybody's the same."

So in that context, you don't want the building to stand out.

You don't want it to have a persona.

POLITO: This isn't a glamorous apartment building.

It's an office building in which people are poured in in the morning and emptied out at the end of the day.

And so it's hard for me not to hear "pour" as a kind of pun on "poor."

NEW: And yet, this poem does seem to celebrate a large and even sublime artifact of human ingenuity that's a new fact of nature.

GEHRY: I visited Chicago for the first time with my father in the early '40s.

There was a kind of beauty, an industrial beauty, and it was pretty powerful.

The memory of it is still in my head.

NEW: The modern-day equivalent of early 20th-century Chicago is 21st-century Beijing.

ZHANG: I grew up in China in the '60s and '70s.

And there was no skyscraper.

So China's skyscrapers really appeared in the last 20 years.

When the skyscrapers came to Beijing and more and more people moved into the city, it creates a very different dynamic for the city.

It's good.

It has the energy that the modern city with that intensity has.

NEW: So, I think "pour" is characteristic of a certain kind of motion that we love about the city.

We pour ourselves into stadiums to see sports events.

For me, that "pour" unites us with larger forces.

ZHANG: When I read this poem, I thought the poet himself saw the skyscraper as a temple.

NEW: I might argue that Carl Sandburg's skyscraper was a sacred space that brings a disparate, heterogeneous population all together, that harnesses or marshals the creativity of many.

- That's not in this poem.

NEW: Not in the poem.

- Not for me.

NEW: Okay.

- I'll tell you what is in the poem, though-- the makers of the building.

POLITO: "Hour by hour, "the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar "clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted."

"To the shape an architect voted."

I should like that, but... - Do you dislike that, the architect voting?

No, I think that's a crack in his armor.

- Okay.

(laughing) (hammering) ZHANG: When the skyscrapers came to Beijing, the country migrants came to the city to build.

So when you go to a construction site, you will see thousands of workers.

WOMAN: "Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar "are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words."

NORMAN: "And so are men "who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes.

"And those who saw it rise, floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here."

NAYO JONES: When people die in the process of building, a lot of times, you know, like, they don't get memorialized.

A lot of the times, you know, when it comes to buildings, things get named after, like, the benefactors, and the people that have, you know, put, like, monetary value, instead of the people who have put, like, physical, like, life work into it.

NORMAN: "One man fell from a girder "and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge.

"He is here.

His soul has gone into the stones of the building."

POLITO: So at the same time that he's fascinated by this modern feat of engineering, he's not going to let you forget for a second the human toll and the human cost behind it.

And I think that's what makes the poem so powerful.

I mean, I think if it was just simply one or the other...

This is very much a kind of collage poem.

NEW: It really is.

You know, made out of contraries and thriving on discontinuity.

- That's right.

And forcing you to look at these oppositions, including the oppositions in his own feelings and his own emotions about what he's writing about.

NEW: "On the office doors from tier to tier, "hundreds of names, "and each name standing for a face "written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million-dollar business."

GEHRY: When people leave, it is somehow the reality that we're sort of in denial about.

But I think everybody will come at it with some references from their lives.

I mean, when you read that, I can feel the tears welling up.

You know, I lost a child, so when I read that, I thought of her.

POLITO: "Wires climb with secrets, "carry light and carry words, "and tell terrors and profits and loves.

"Curses of men grappling plans of business, and questions of women in plots of love."

NEW: All the human drama we see on this great vertical stage.

- And the people, right?

He spent a lot of time, talked about the terrors, the loves, the curses of men, and the question of women in plots of love.

Right away, I was thinking about, "Oh, what could be that?"

You know, what could be the plots?

What could be the terrors?

WOMAN: "Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers "take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers."

NEW: She makes ten dollars a week.

ZHANG: Right.

For then, it was considered little.

And so he wanted to point it out-- a stenographer's pay was low.

And then the cleaners.

NORMAN: "Pails clang.

"Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues."

ZHANG: I hadn't realized in the beginning of the 20th century in America, the cleaners were already new immigrants.

- Yes.

- So it's not so different from today-- you go into a building after work, and the cleaners are typically the people who are speaking foreign languages.

What we get is the honoring of those cleaners.

NORMAN: "Broom and water and mop "clean from the floors human dust and spit and machine grime of the day."

There's a largeness... That's right, yeah.

- ...to this small activity.

CAMERON MESSINIDES: That reminds you, don't forget the work of these people who make it possible, even though it's easy to marginalize them and forget them.

Like, their work is just as important.

NEW: "Hands of clocks "turn to noon hours, "and each floor empties its men and women "who go away and eat and come back to work."

POLITO: It's almost like they're machines that are going off to be refueled at lunchtime so that they can come back and do even more work in the afternoon.

It's very joyless.

And I, with my more benign reading of the poem, read that in a way that there's a rhythm and a cadence to modern life, that, by the way, seems completely recognizable to all of us.

CLARK: I kind of have this image of the skyscraper sighing.

When it sighs, all the people go out, they, you know, eat, and it breathes back in, all the people come back up the elevators.

GEHRY: There's no reference to beauty and feeling of the building.

Sandburg's clear.

He's telling you that there's no soul in the bloody thing until the people get there.

But I think we want the building to have soul when you look at it.

You want to go in and love it and be there because you love it, and then the soul is double... double-charged.

ZHANG: The architects are so important in their imagination of how a building will eventually be created.

I always get attracted by someone's ideas who are most emotional.

And that emotion is some component of the soul.

GEHRY: In a way, it's sculpture, right?

Either something you dismiss in 30 seconds and say it's, oh, another one of those, or does it engage you because it's got a beautiful window pattern, or a sculptural form or something, that talks to the city it's in?

It's like when you see a great painting, and you really resonate with it, it keeps you for days, sometimes a week, you know, if you really get into it.

It's better than a shot of tequila.

(laughs) NORMAN: "One by one, the floors are emptied.

"The uniformed elevator men are gone.

"Darkness on the hallways.

"Voices echo.

"Silence holds.

"Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors."

I think there's something peaceful about the guards who are walking floor to floor, and checking to make sure everything's in its place-- that's their job, that's their livelihood.

That's beautiful.

CLARK: "Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets.

"Steel safes stand in corners.

Money is stacked in them."

"Money is stacked in them."

That's... That's sad.

The building, at night, is turned over to these guards, these night watchmen, who are kind of literally guarding, you know, with their revolvers, the results of capitalism.

POLITO: "Spelled in electric fire on the roof "are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money."

"Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words "telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money."

Just the image of burning electric fire atop a skyscraper.

It's reached up all its 20 stories to display this message from the top.

It's being broadcast for all these people.

LACESNE: "A young watchman leans at a window "and sees the lights "of barges butting their way "across a harbor.

"Nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, "and a span of glooms, splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses in clusters over the sleeping city."

Well, it's a very romantic notion of this single, lone person who's the guardian of the night for that building.

It's a powerful image.

POLITO: That young watchman, who, in a lot of ways, is the only individuated figure in the poem, it's hard not to connect him with the poet, with the author of the poem.

- Absolutely.

This young watchman is Sandburg, you know, living in Chicago, kind of putting all the details of this together, and... NEW: Well, that is what a poet is.

A poet is a close observer.

POLITO: He's a watchman.

NEW: And what he surveys is this gorgeous panorama.

GEHRY: The romance of the city in the evening with the lights, and we all feel that.

I look out a window in Manhattan and I see the Woolworth Building and the Empire State Building, and I get all excited about it.

And we all love it.

- We love it, that's right.

And we pay extra to live in a place so we can look at it.

POLITO: For all of this beauty that's going on in the city at night, he still includes the phrase "a span of glooms."

It's an incredibly skillful poem that really, just kind of line by line, section by section, is moving in multiple directions simultaneously with, I think, you know, a very powerful vision of what it means to live in a city in, you know, the... - In the 20th century, yeah.

LACESNE: "By night, "the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul."

♪ ♪