The skyscraper is the building type that dominates our cities, absorbs vast amounts of capital in design, construction and maintenance, and houses large numbers of people in offices and apartments. Ada Louise Huxtable--America's most acclaimed architecture critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Prize Fellow--offers here an energetic defense of cities and a brilliant consideration of the skyscraper as art, as business, as the product of politics and speculation.