That Vertical Freedom Feeling
When I was a kid, one of my most vivid fantasies was visiting the ecosystem of a gas giant— one with an atmosphere so dense that creatures could swim through the air. In this alien climate, air life would become marine life. Birds would become fish. Sky would become sea.
This fantasy resonated with me because it gave me that vertical freedom feeling: true vertical agency. Our society gives us plenty of vertical agency, whether that’s elevators, planes, or buildings that touch the sky. But this agency is often underwhelming. Many things that are ostensibly vertical don’t give that vertical freedom feeling at all.
Consider skyscrapers, which may stretch into the sky but are ultimately just a bunch of 2-D worlds stacked on top of each other. Vertical movement is possible, but it must be mediated by the black boxes that are elevators. Would a building with lateral elevators and floors laid end to end feel much different from a skyscraper? Very little of the operations within a skyscraper actually hinge upon its verticality.
In light of this, most of our vertical marvels are scarcely more than 2-D projections into 3-D space. Even a passenger plane can feel like a plane of the geometric variety. You may get beautiful views of 3-D space, but the environment is disappointingly 2-D.
When I was very young, I liked to savor that vertical freedom feeling. Remember the context that young children exist in. Their perspective is inherently vertical, as they must travel upwards to access objects in the “flat” environment like tables and door handles due to their small size. This small size facilitates a wider suite of vertical activities, like riding on the shoulders of parents, climbing jungle gyms, and sledding.
As children, we are front-loaded with humanity’s vertical feats: the moon landing, Mount Everest, the Statue of Liberty. Since this information tracked with my vertical daily activities, I assumed that the world of adults would be even more vertical than the world of children. This expectation left me disappointed again and again.
For example, I was ecstatic when I learned I would be visiting a nearby school called Mann Elementary. This was because of my perfectly reasonable assumption that the school would be shaped like a giant man. Why not? Is that really so different from the Statue of Liberty? That morning, I fantasized about climbing up giant metal legs all the way up to the head until I got smacked over the head by the dull reality.
I was also shocked to learn that even the most basic personal flight devices were lies. I figured flying cars were still of the future since I never saw any. But hoverboards? Jetpacks? My media diet implied that these were established technologies. When I learned that even state-of-the-art jetpacks only last ~30 seconds, I was scandalized.
After learning that the “real world” lacked the verticality I sought, I turned to virtual ones. But even virtual worlds often had this flatness to them. My favorite childhood game, Pokémon, had such a flat environment that even my dad made fun of it. I was often frustrated by the game’s 2-D graphics, as well as its stationary, flat battles that lacked the dynamism of their TV counterparts.
While the diving sequences of Pokémon Emerald and the Distortion World sequences of Pokémon Platinum gave me brief tastes of verticality, these contexts were stubbornly restrictive. Since it existed only to facilitate major plot points, novel ways to engage with this verticality were sparse. I loved Pokémon, but for that vertical freedom feeling I needed something more.
I had especially high hopes for a board game called Khet, which had actual laser beams that bounced around a two-level board. But the game wasn’t nearly as vertical as I had hoped. The laser did travel upwards, but its ascent was mediated by a black tower fittingly resembling an elevator. Like high-rises with elevators, Khet was vertical, but it wasn’t vertical in the same way that it was horizontal.
I experienced that vertical freedom feeling1 just one time after “vertical maturity”, which was when I visited the City Museum in St. Louis. The City Museum is an epic vertical playground full of wonders: 29,000 repurposed artifacts, two suspended aircraft fuselages, and one ten-story slide. The museum has many singular qualities, but its standout feature is scaling the vertical worlds of children up to adult size.
But the City Museum is ultimately still meant for kids. Respectable adults are not meant to regularly climb play structures. And unlike the serious business of recess tag, none of the serious business of adulthood happens in vertical structures. Adults still have opportunities to climb, but they must seek them out in their non-vertical world.
I originally took the flatness of the adult world as a universal truth, but I’ve recently been questioning its inevitability. In his sociology classic Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott proposed that modern political governance requires destructive flattening. He argued that pre-modern society is too messy to fit into the censuses, districting, and tabulation that advanced governance requires. Because of this, lossy “flattening” processes like standardizing language are needed to make society properly “legible”.
Sometimes this means literal flattening. Consider our own city of Seattle, which was far more vertical before the historic Denny Regrade. This project removed Denny Hill, a sizable landform that covered much of modern Belltown. This change had positive economic consequences, but it does feel like something was lost. In the world of high modernism, verticality is something to be tamed.
You might be skeptical that state-sponsored social conditioning made the world flat, but the Kowloon Walled City makes a strong case for this theory. After thousands of Chinese Civil War refugees occupied it, authorities were unable to establish control over the abandoned military fort of Kowloon. This lack of de facto governance allowed a strange organicity to take root. Without zoning laws to tame them, vertical worlds of all shapes and sizes cropped up all over Kowloon. The result was lawless, dangerous, and unsafe. But it was also strangely beautiful.
I really appreciate how imagery from the political left emphasizes verticality, in the spirit of organic communities like Kowloon. The leftist architecture of tomorrow is typically free-flowing, naturalistic, and spontaneous, often explicitly seeking to align itself with the contours of nature. This creates an effective aesthetic contrast against the artificiality and coldness of hyper-capitalistic built environments.
One example of such imagery is “Seize the Elevators”, an article from the magazine Current Affairs. The article argues that nationalization is the natural solution to the high cost of elevators, which limits private high-rise development. Not only would this spur economic growth, but it would also facilitate a vibrant network of public skyways, which would unify the upper floors of cities with their streets. This vertical vision seems to echo my cosmic gas-oceans fantasy, at least in spirit.
Verticality is especially prominent in climate-inspired aesthetics like hydropunk, which focuses on civilizations that embrace the sea. Typical elements include mobile pods, glass tunnels, and reef-like vertical structures. Since the sea is itself a vertical world, any effort to embrace it must also embrace verticality.
Of course, hydropunk is a response to practical concerns. Island nations in the Pacific will turn to similar visions for inspiration as they stare down imminent submersion. A hydropunk-like project called Oceanix City is proposing permanent water settlement on networks of floating pods. Migrating from sinking, stable lands to floating, mobile pods would certainly spur a change in spatial perspective.
The climate crisis may very well nudge our society back in the direction of verticality, and I think we’d all be better for it. Ideally, such a shift would come under less dire circumstances. But after we weather the coming storm, perhaps our descendants will once again get to savor that vertical freedom feeling.
I didn’t get a chance to fit it in this essay, but I wanted to mention another virtual vertical inspiration: local sci-fi luminary Ted Chiang’s story “Tower of Babylon”. The story imagines a tower so tall that it takes multiple weeks to reach the top. This forces communities high up in the tower to be self-sufficient, as food is quite literally out of reach. Imagining a world where people could live and die without ever seeing the ground is especially mind-bending.
This “lack of ground” is equal parts exciting and challenging. Similarly to the gas-ocean, the Tower doesn’t fit into any existing schema of how things are supposed to work. Even though every single technology in the story is primitive, the unusual setup makes the story feel deeply alien, sublime, and almost unsettling. But it’s also an incredibly beautiful story.