Andreas Bernard

The world we live in has been shaped, in deep and profound ways, by technologies we barely think about. Lifted is a fascinating, maddening, idiosyncratic exploration of one of them: a book about elevators as a force that transformed cities and the experience of living and working in them.

Elevators forced architects to make the internal arrangement of buildings more uniform and more systematically organized. They ushered in the era of standardized floor plans, standard-height floors, and consecutive floor numbering. They made possible the roof garden, did away with the stuffy attic garret, democratized access to the street by making a trip to the 14th floor no more work than a trip to the 4th. They turned the upper floors of tall buildings into desirable, expensive spaces for the first time, creating a world in which social class mapped—in a linear, straightforward way—onto the structure of the building. Andreas Bernard traces these changes as they unfolded in (mostly) Berlin, New York, and Paris between the 1850s and about 1900. He focuses on what we would now think of as mid-rise office and residential buildings, and winds up his narrative just before the beginning of the skyscraper era.

Three of the four chapters of Lifted dig deeply into these neglected aspects of elevator history, and will likely fascinate readers interested in architecture, urban planning, and the history of nineteenth-century city life. The fourth, shortest chapter considers the evolution of elevator controls, the gradual de-skilling of the elevator operator’s job, and the psychology of the push-button—a gift for those intrigued by technology, labor, and their intersection, but slightly out of place in the larger narrative. Bernard writes about all these issues with verve, and analyzes them in sophisticated but accessible ways.

What is missing from Lifted is a clear chronological framework into which readers can fit this information. Bernard gives little sense of the evolution of the elevator over time, its spread through the world’s cities, and its progress from luxury add-on to basic infrastructure. The chapters, because of their thematic organization, zigzag back and forth across the same material multiple times, from multiple perspectives. Cutting the story off at the beginning of the skyscraper age—a decision that, like the thematic chapters, serves the story that Bernard wants to tell—further diminishes the book’s appeal to broader audiences, for whom the marriage of elevator and skyscraper is the most familiar part of the story.

Lifted is not a linear, narrative-driven book about the history of technology in the vein of Henry Petroski (The Pencil) or Tom Standage The Victorian Internet). It is, however, a thoughtful, well-written, eye-opening book, and—for anyone interested in the emergence of the modern city—an essential one.… (más)