Science continuously struggles against the realism of language and the realism of the imagination.
—Maurice Blanchot

IN THE LATE 19th century, and coinciding, significantly, with the formation of the modern myth of the metropolis and the appearance of the skyscraper, a new theme appears in the visual universe of images of the city and its architecture: the way buildings are shown rising into the air suggests an ideal of freeing them from their foundations in the earth. This fantasy of ascension ultimately describes buildings hovering in the sky, released from the constraints of gravity and