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From the beginning the skyscraper was defined by superlatives. As business propositions each building had to sell itself to prospective tenants in the language of advertising: the type was new, but each speculative tower was the newest, the tallest, the largest. As the number of skyscrapers increased, the means of distinguishing one from the next also needed to grow in an arms race to garner publicity and appeal to the best tenants. By the turn of the century, and the publication of Louis Sullivan’s essay “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” (1896), that arms race needed to add “most beautiful” to the arsenal. Sullivan saw that square footage was no longer enough and cities were suffering from blocks put up merely to achieve real-estate goals. He was one of the first to identify what could make one skyscraper aesthetically superior to the next and in doing so created a basic checklist for any criticism (beyond price) of the type. Mumford’s “House of Glass” did the same for the first important innovation for American skyscrapers since 1896: the curtain wall, which swept aside historical ornament and traditional layout with glass and openplan offices, respectively. Today the competition of superlatives continues. The primary focus of this chapter is “House of Glass,” longtime New Yorker architecture critic Lewis Mumford’s 1952 review of Lever House, the first all-glass skyscraper built in New York City after World War II. But the larger lesson is the continuity in criticism, from 1896 to the present day, of the search for something new in architecture via the skyscraper. Sullivan anatomized the parts of the tall office building, showing us the structure beneath the stone or glass or metal skins. Mumford shows us how Lever House rewrites those rules, setting a different sort of standard than the race for the sky epitomized by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. Sullivan’s ideal skyscrapers are freestanding sculptures, while Mumford’s have to work on specific sites, offer public open spaces and daylit offices, and be symbols of American optimism. So powerful was Lever’s example that when, in 2006, the Hearst Tower by Foster + Partners opened on Eighth Avenue in New York City, Paul Goldberger harked back to a descendent of Lever House to amplify his praise in “Triangulation” (New Yorker, December 19, 2005). Hearst also offered an open base, a brand-new transparent facade, and a new beginning after a wounding event (the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001). But it also added the latest –est: greenest.