Skyscraper (1996)
Gordon is being physically beaten up by a terrorist who is expert in hand-to-hand combat but is rescued by his wife. Fairfax finally finds the device, kills his right-hand man Jacques and heads for the roof, hoping to coerce Carrie at gunpoint into flying him out. He has not bargained on Gordon also being there (Gordon also has the young boy in tow). Gordon is shot in the shoulder. Carrie knocks the gun from his hand and engages Fairfax with swift kicks and punches which sends Fairfax falling to his death from the 86-story skyscraper to the street down below.
Skyscraper (1996)
"There is a sort of sad, tragic quality there," says architect and historian Robert A. M. Stem. "The era of the skyscraper was over. The Empire State Building was under construction, but I think every other skyscraper was finished and the likelihood of another being built was quite in the distance." The Great Depression was under way, and it was suddenly a bad time to be in the skyline business.
Carrie has inadvertently taken him and his goons to the 86 floors of the Zitex building, the titular skyscraper. Hey maybe they settled on 86 floors to commemorate the age Anna's husband was when they first met, wouldn't that have been neat?
Such is the fate of the much-maligned skyscraper in Europe. Seen at first as an American export, then as an unsightly blight, the European skyscraper remains mired in an identity crisis. Yet as other countries, most notably those in Asia, have successfully incorporated the high-rise into their local landscape, many European cities have decided to take a fresh look at the role skyscrapers will play in their future.
Christoph Ingenhoven, of the architectural firm Ingenhoven & Overdiekh in Dsseldorf, believes new high-rises can be integrated into European cities. Mr. Ingenhoven is trying to help revitalize the concept of what a European skyscraper should be.
"In the '60s and '70s skyscrapers were built in Germany because everyone thought that being ... optimistic meant building skyscrapers," he says. "But they did a really bad job, so now when Germans think of skyscrapers they think of those buildings." Indeed, the flyer circulated by the citizen's initiative against the planned post office high-rise pictures a dumpy, gray building straight out of the '70s.
"A German skyscraper would be much more ecologically oriented - windows you can open, and a more social way of dealing with office spaces," he says. "In the older buildings, the secretary is 70 feet from the nearest window and the boss is seven feet away. That's not acceptable. We're looking for a more democratic skyscraper, where everybody gets a good view. This leads to narrow skyscrapers that aren't too tall."
"A good building can add to [the scenery]," he says. "It's all a question of quality. If the solution for a skyscraper is a good one, then say 'go ahead and build it.' But if you don't have a good one, tell them to go away."
Too many skyscrapers could undermine the vitality of the downtown area by creating a population that only works there during the day and which leaves the inner city lifeless at night - a problem many American cities know all too well.
Lynn Beedle, director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., is quick to discount such arguments. He says the commuter culture that leads to urban desolation is not linked to skyscrapers.
To explain Europe's relative lack of high-rises, he explains: "Just over 100 years ago was the first time skyscrapers were built, and by that time, most European cities were already industrialized. Since American cities are younger, they were not all fully at that level yet." This lack of urban development in the late 1800's allowed American cities to more easily incorporate new architectural developments.
Frankfurt, however, is one of the exceptions. It was almost totally destroyed in World War II, and had to rebuild itself architecturally and economically after 1945. Dieter von Lpke, director of city planning for Frankfurt, says Frankfurt allowed skyscrapers to be built to facilitate its growth as a financial center.
Rainbow 6: Vegas represented a big shift in design for the traditionally methodical Tom Clancy franchise. At the time of its release, games like Halo and Gears of War had changed the shooter landsape dramatically, and Ubisoft Montreal wasn't looking to get trampled under the boots of progress. The result was a shooter that remained highly tactical, but sported the kind of polish, pacing, and features FPS junkies had come to expect. Sexy visuals, regenerating health, an excellent cover system, and the odd instance of repelling down the side of a skyscraper made this the breeziest and most imminently playable R6 title to date.
WEBSTER: Yes. You go to a place like Vietnam, and you fly into Noy Vey Airport, Hanoi, which was once a huge airfield in the war. And as you fly in you see bomb craters as far as you can see that are still in the ground, you know, have been left there for 25 years. The Vietnamese have taken these craters, they've knit them together with dikes. They are always at want for protein as a nation, and they're fish farming in them. And you know, the idea that they have pulled life, you know, turned war inside out and pulled life out of it, that's one of the things I want to do in this book is have people stare at the reality of this and say okay, how can we make it, turn this around? And the Vietnamese have done it all over, you know. In the DMZ, this is one of their favorite stories, they collect all the scrap. They grade it, you know, different grades of scrap metal, steel. They send it to a series of 10 different rolling mills, steel mills, in which case they may turn it into I-beams or wiring conduit. You know, they're building skyscrapers really like crazy now, or else they turn it into ingots, sell it to the Japanese, the Japanese turn it into cars which they sell back to us, and the Vietnamese think that is the funniest thing in the world. 041b061a72