For the 2005 Dubai Duty Free Men’s Open, Roger Federer and Andre Agassi—two of the most recognizable names in tennis—were drafted into a PR-stunt 210 meters in the air: a friendly match atop the helipad of the Burj Al Arab luxury hotel. Though primarily intended to promote the tournament, the sight of these two titans (the former of whom the writer David Foster Wallace once accurately described as “a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light”) scurrying atop the glass and steel tower effects a comparison to King Kong perched on the Empire State Building. The athletes appear to at once dominate the architecture and be dominated by it, imbibing the materiality of the structure with a fantastical quality. Like the giant ape and the skyscraper, or the superstar athletes and the Burj Al Arab, a similar tension between mutualism and parasitism can be read in the symbiotic relationship between architecture and PR. While architects might like to pretend otherwise, the reality of high-end development is that promotion matters as much as paint: a factory line of attention is needed to ensure units are rented, funds are flowing, and staff are employed. Such spectacles seem to defy architecture—or, at least, its self-definition as a formal art. Nevertheless, they also define it, since architectural success for this class is ultimately indexed as much (or more) by sales as by structural innovation. Words by @sinasohrab.