Vertical City

If you flipped through travel magazines, whether Kyoto or Florence, these cities all shared one feature: there were few tall buildings. The highest points in the city were usually Buddhist pagodas or church bell towers. Even Bern's highest point was a medieval church.

The highest point on Venice's main island was the bell tower of St. Mark's Basilica, but most buildings in the city were only three or four stories tall.

This was dictated by the main island's limited area. The world's first "skyscraper" was built in a slum, on the Greek island of Crete, the little island where Greek mythology and European civilization were born.

In myth, Minos was born of Zeus and his lover Europa. Zeus had once transformed into a bull to meet Europa, thereby avoiding harm from Hera, Queen of the Gods. Thus, Europa's son Minos never used strong bulls as sacrifices to the gods, offending them. The gods made Minos's queen fall in love with a bull, and she gave birth to the bull-headed, human-bodied monster Minotaur. From then on, the man-eating beast Minotaur plunged the Cretans into a vortex of terror. Minos decided to invite Daedalus, Greece's outstanding architect of the time, to build a labyrinth within the Palace of Knossos to hide Minotaur. Athens was then a vassal state of Crete, and Minos ordered the Athenian king to send seven boys and seven girls to Crete every nine years, to be placed in the labyrinth as food for Minotaur.

The Athenian prince Theseus resolved to rid the people of this menace. He traveled to Crete with the boys and girls, where the Cretan princess Ariadne fell in love with him at first sight and gave him a magic sword and a ball of thread. Theseus entered the labyrinth with the sword, unwinding the