Exploring the socio-material geographies of making skyscrapers in Sydney 'stand up'

This is a thesis about how skyscrapers ‘stand up’ through processes of assembling. The thesis argues that understanding how skyscrapers stand up is not so much about the raw materials such as concrete and steel or the ‘raw’ planning process (for example), but socio–material entanglements, in other words, the relational imbrication of the ‘things’—resources, technologies, ambitions, ideas, biota, entities and elements—that comprise an assemblage such as a skyscraper. I argue for a theoretical approach based on current cultural geographies accounts of buildings, contending that theorising a skyscraper as an assemblage is a way of acknowledging the cast of actors and processes that make a skyscraper stand up. To counter the human–centrism that tends to characterise earlier scholarship on buildings, I argue for an approach that conceptualises materiality as discursive, vibrant, and wild. What is important for this thesis is how making a skyscraper stand up in socio–material entanglements that are discursive, vibrant, and wild, calls for never–ending labours from humans. The thesis explores three types of labours of making a skyscraper stand up: the work of ‘storying’ discursive materialities; the work of ‘controlling’ vibrant materialities; and the work of ‘care–taking’ for wild materialities. The thesis uses an assemblage methodology based on operationalising an ethnographic sensibility to grasp the multiple registers of life and eventful–ness of the more–than–human and socio–material entanglements that make a skyscraper stand up. I use this methodology to research three skyscrapers built in the City of Sydney in the early 2000s—1 Bligh Street, 8 Chifley Square and One Central Park—and I cover their making from the initial stages of planning and development, to engineering and construction, to inhabitation and maintenance.