Will The Real Empire State Building Please Stand Up?

Mark Kingwell straddles the worlds of academia and popular criticism. He is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto who also lectures widely and is the author of eight books and numerous articles and columns. Two of his particular fascinations are the contradictions and perplexities of American culture to which he brings a special Canadian insider/outsider acuity, and design and architecture. In Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams, these come together in a highly engaging search for the meaning of the Empire State Building.

Since its creation, the Empire State Building’s spire has acted as a lightning rod both literally (it is struck more than a hundred times per year) and metaphorically. As Kingwell tells us: “It has been inhabited and visited by millions, reproduced and modeled hundreds of thousands of times in every imaginable medium from film to butter, starred in more than a hundred films, been...