"...sky-scrapers have no cellars (or attics, in the classic meaning of the word). From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horinzonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality.

...in addition to the intimate value of verticality, a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one.

...the house's situation in the world, gives us, quite concretely, a variation of the metaphysically summarized situation of man in the world."

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.