A certain type of person who may have a working space in the center of a city would expect height in their domestic environment too. They would wish to take their height home with them and thus penthouse apartments and flats in St. Georges Tower that go up by £10,000 for every floor. Of course, the alternative - the urban sprawl of US fame - is probably born of a wish to separate the work and home, and more often than not, return to the initial sense of material boasting that occupies the gated, gravel-driveway'd houses of our own suburbias.
Science-fiction architecture (sometimes the best kind) seems to draw on this obsession with verticallity, though usually citing population inflation as the main reason. Again however, the controllers of the world sit at the top while the peons often inhabit an under-city where they cannot be observed and do not interact (think Metropolis, that Doctor Who episode, Brave New World) Architecture, as is so obvious it need not be said, is a physicality of our own social beliefs. Science-fiction writers use it as a way to analogise their worlds. It in turn can be used to analogise our own.
