This article appeared before the tragic bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. We present it as a tribute to the spirit of always trying to reach higher in all our endeavors.

Skycraper utopias have loomed large in prophetic fiction-impossibly tall and imposing structures that serve as self-contained urban environments.  

Had it been built, Sir Norman Foster's Millennium Tower in Tokyo Bay would have been the last great skyscraper of the 20th Century. 

The dimensions of the Millennium Tower-2,625 feet high with 170 stories-were truly staggering, almost twice the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago and three times the Eiffel Tower.

The Millennium Tower (pictured above as a model) featured cafes, cinemas, restaurants, apartments, hotels and offices under one spiraling roof. Promotional literature described the city within a city as "a vertical version of Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue or Paris' Champs Elysees."

Foster's grand vision was to transform skyscrapers into fully-functioning communities. The idea was not new; architects including Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright created scale models of impossibly-high skyscrapers.

Le Corbusier's fantasy, a "Radiant City" filled with rows of glass-and-steel skyscrapers built on a symmetrical grid of streets, was matched in sheer chutzpah by Frank Lloyd Wright's proposal to build a 528-story building called Mile-High Illinois. "No one can afford to build it now," Wright told the stunned gathering in 1956, "but in the future no one can afford not build it."

Originally an American phenomenon, the skyscraper has become an international symbol of prestige. Currently, the tallest building is the 1,454 feet-tall Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but there are plans to build taller ones in Taiwan, Brazil and China. 

Every week brings a new, extravagant plan to build a towering skyscraper. The latest trend is the "megastructure," an imposing edifice that contains everything a dweller could need within its walls. Most of these grand plans-like the Le Corbusier's Radiant City and Wright's Mile-High Illinois-never do break ground.

Foster's Millennium Tower, however, may still see the light of day, reports Katy Harris of Foster and Partners. "We have redesigned the Millennium Tower twice for sites in Japan and in China," explains Harris, "(A) few years ago Donald Trump expressed an interest in building it but finally decided to buy the Empire State Building instead!"

Should the stunning conical-shaped structure ever go beyond a blueprint, Foster's design promises a radical reconceptualization of what a skyscraper's function could and should be. With enough room to house 52,000 people, the Foster's towering skyscraper would, in essence, be a self-contained city. 

Foster is a passionate advocate of creating visually-impressive structures that retain a sense of human scale. Before his ambitious plan to build the Millennium Tower went belly up, Foster's blueprint promised new solutions to the problem of urban density-a situation particularly acute in Tokyo. "A totally new urban concept," according to the design statement, the building (800 meters or 2,625 feet high)--"an alternative to the alienating, polluting, fragmentation of existing urban development."

Although the celebrated architect hoped to have the Millennium Tower completed by the year 2000, Foster still actively courts parties who might be interested in funding his dream project. "It is a matter of finding a developer/client to invest in the tower," reports Harris, "not us to revive our plans."