Skyscrapers are architecture's sunflowers. Given a good, sunny financial climate, they will soar into the urban firmament, blossoming extravagantly, heady, ostentatious symbols of high rolling cities.

But, when the financial climate is poor, they refuse to grow so very high; and sometimes, as in the case of British Land's "Cheesegrater" in the City of London, they stay in the ground waiting for the good times to come again.

The "Cheesegrater" is just one of several skyscrapers currently planned for the City of London and originally due for completion at much the same time - between 2010 and the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games. The seeds of this latest generation of high-rise buildings have been planted by developers. This is architecture as a cash crop, designed primarily not to adorn the City's skyline, but to generate ambitious and even sky-high profits.

This is not to say that such buildings can't be inspiring and even beautiful; they can. One of the most aggressively commercial of all skyscrapers was the Empire State Building. Completed just in time to meet the full effects of the Wall Street Crash, this astonishing building – the tallest in the world in 1930 – stood mostly empty for the much of the 1930s.

Known as the Empty State Building, its seemingly endless office floors only finally filled up after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Government war departments found a home here and the building came into its own.

The Empire State Building, though, was always special. It was such an astonishing, bravura performance, that it somehow won the hearts of the majority of New Yorkers and became, instantly and despite its initial poor economic performance, a wonder of the modern world. Today, it's a national treasure and global tourist magnet as well as a busy commercial building that more than earns its keep.

Manhattan, however, is dotted about with any number of dull built-to-let skyscrapers that, while looking good en-masse, especially when seen from a distance, are pretty disappointing as works of architecture when seen close up.

These are very much gigantic machines for making money. In London, where there have been great concerns about the look and character of the skyline surrounding St Paul's Cathedral in recent years, there had been an attempt to make at least some of these big-buck buildings look half-decent. Developers have taken to employing architects like Richard Rogers (the "Cheesegrater") and Renzo Piano (London Bridge Tower, or the "Glass Shard") precisely because their talented firms are able to make ruthlessly commercial skyscrapers look good.

Reaching for the skies

Even so, the fate of these buildings, especially in their early stages of development, is very much at the mercy of economic swings. Their very height is determined by economic forecasts, although to build as high as both the "Cheesegrater" and the "Glass Shard" developers have to take a big gamble. Contemporary city skylines can almost be read as graphs of the ups and downs of the economy at any given time. When the going is good for developers, tall buildings reach as if for the stratosphere. When the going gets tough, the skyline dips.

The City of London is, of course, a machine for making money. Much of its architecture over the past 25 years has been pretty horrendous stuff. In the Eighties boom, when flashy postmodernism was the vogue amongst architects and planners, many had something of the look of a shiny, padded-suited broker. More recently, City buildings have tended to resemble giant mobile phones.

Although the "Cheesegrater" is among the better looking of the latest wave of City of London skyscrapers, many people in and out of London will breathe something of a sigh of relief that the recent high-rise boom has been curtailed by the current downturn in the economy.

Here is a time to pause and to think of what the City of London might appear to be in a decade's time. Should it really have the look of today's Shanghai – which it increasingly does – or might it find its very own style again, as it did in the days of both Sir Christopher Wren (the late 17th and early 18th centuries) and of Sir Edwin Lutyens (the early to mid 20th century)?

I guess, though, that the "Cheesegrater" and its rival City skyscrapers are simply biding their time. When the financial sun is shining brightly once more, these aggressive, and occasionally stylish, buildings will soar again, as high into the sky as any developer dares and as any City planner encourages them.