After living in Manhattan for 14 years and working for the New York City Planning Commission, Wolner became intrigued with how skyscrapers reflected and expressed the larger culture in the 1920s. The result of his research is his book in progress: Skyscraper Romances from the Great War through the Great Depression.

Wolner notes that during this era, skyscrapers promoted and celebrated technological advance, America's first modern maturity, and self-made men and their corporations. "Skyscrapers (particularly ones like the Chrysler and Woolworth buildings) weren't just advertisements for the corporation," he says. "They were the most powerful kind of advertisements." Today these "statements in concrete and steel" don't make the impact they once did, he says. "The rhetorical power of buildings has been usurped by the advent of modern media like film, television, and the computer."

Wolner's research and writing, funded in part by fellowships from the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization (Brown University) and The Wolfsonian Museum (Florida International University) fills a gap in the field. Some researchers have examined the technology and design of skyscrapers without probing their cultural significance; others have looked at social or artistic values without probing the skyscraper's formidable rhetorical power. Wolner's book focuses on skyscraper rhetoric found in the architecture and art (murals, mosaics, and sculpture) and the underlying social or political realities of the time.

His investigation has revealed that some of the most unusual skyscrapers were those built by state and local governments in smaller midwestern cities between 1920 and 1935. "I'm looking at buildings in cities not usually associated with skyscrapers," Wolner says, citing relatively unknown skyscraper city halls, county courthouses, and state capitals in Buffalo, Cincinnati, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, Kansas City, and Lincoln. These "anonymous" structures were often as elaborate as corporate headquarters. "They reinforced and advanced the notion of the authoritative character of state or local government," he says. "Their romance tends to take a more epic form, particularly in those areas with surviving pockets of the Progressive Movement."

Reading a building is not only a way to understand its historical significance as a structure, but also American culture at the time it was built, according to Wolner. He believes the exceptional height and telescoping forms of skyscrapers evoked a transcendent vision of life for which the traditional vehicle had been romance literature until explosive urban growth, the skyscraper's intimations of life's extraordinary possibilities, and the imperatives of corporate modernization forced architecture and this kind of literature to intersect.

"This book is an essay on the rhetoric of buildings," Wolner explains. "Modern media has leached away that power (it isn't what it used to be) but we can understand it. The romance narrative attached to skyscrapers had everything to do with the awe, the wonder, and the magic fostered by those buildings."