Posted on 02/24/2007 7:17:13 AM PST by aculeus
The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.
In October, at the premier international conference of skyscraper builders, the first speaker announced without a hint of irony or doubt that by 2030, somewhere, a mile-high skyscraper would be built. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet. One-tenth of the way to the ozone layer. More than three times as tall as anything now standing and exactly as high as the most fantastic towers ever dared conceived.
When the speaker made this prediction, there was no murmur of dissent from his colleagues, not a single snicker. Nor was David Scott, an accomplished engineer and the chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, hustled off the stage and gently dosed back to a normative view of what can be achieved by mortals. The 750 planners, designers, and technicians in the room met his statement with a shrug—not, it seemed, because Mr. Scott had lost the thread, not because they were jaded by the repetition of an ancient dream (mile-high towers were proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s and by Norman Foster in the 1980s) but because what he said was so obvious, so attainable. For many years it has been a commonplace in the profession that no impediments to such heights exist: the technologies are waiting for the money and the willing client.
Indeed, sitting there in rows, a half-story below ground in an auditorium on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, were the very people who could build a tower one mile high: the foundation engineers who already knew how to pin such a thing to the earth, the structural engineers who could keep it standing in a 100-year wind, the architects who would give it form, the contractors who would know how to phase the behemoth’s construction—even the guys who would have to figure out how to wash the windows. And there are going to be a lot of windows.
Dubai (400)Welcome to Babel. The language is English, the units are metric, the know-how is mostly American, and the site is anywhere in the world where money, land, and opportunity converge, catalyzed by optimism—personal, corporate, or national. Five years after September 11, well into what was expected to be the post-skyscraper era, a boom of increasingly improbable proportions is underway and it shows no signs of abating. Like a bar graph measuring increased faith in the future, the towers keep getting taller—after lingering for decades around 1,400 feet, the height now needed to achieve a jaw-dropping wow-factor is approaching 2,000 feet—and all the biggest are clustered far from the building type’s familiar centers in North America.
“Everyone I know flies from Dubai to Tokyo to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei,” says Carol Willis, an architectural historian and founder of New York’s Skyscraper Museum. “They’re almost never home.”
The current “world’s tallest” titleholder, the 101-story tower completed in Taipei in 2004, stands at a sinister 1,666 feet. When it is completed in 2008, the Lotte World II Tower in Busan, South Korea, will edge seven feet higher. The Burj Dubai, an epochal construction, stands now at about 1,000 feet with only 90 of its planned 160-plus stories completed; when it is finished in 2009, it may top out at over 2,600 feet—however, just as in the great Manhattan skyscraper race of the late 1920s (which the Chrysler Building won with its extended spire before being dwarfed in 1931 by the Empire State Building), the true planned height is a closely guarded secret. The Burj Dubai’s lead architect, Adrian Smith (until recently with the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill but now doing business as Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture), says that as soon as the final number is announced, a competing developer in Dubai will release plans for an even higher tower. A building down the Emirates coast in Doha, to be completed next year, will likely make little news: at 1,460 feet, it is a baby—only ten feet taller than the Sears Tower, which, with 108 floors, has been the tallest building in the United States for the last 33 years and is now (but for not much longer) the third-tallest in the world.
What’s behind the new boom? The quick answer, of course, is money. Except for very rare exceptions like the polemically motivated, 1,083-foot-tall Ryugyong Tower in Pyongyang, North Korea (if its stalled construction resumes, it will be the world’s tallest hotel), skyscrapers are built for two reasons: to make money, responding to existing demand, or to advertise and flaunt the money one already has. The current boom is driven by both, but the latter impetus—the realm of ego, personal or national—seems to be winning the day.
Of the ten tallest towers now standing, six are in China. In Shanghai—to pick but one impossibly dynamic city—nearly 100 buildings over 500 feet tall (typically, around 40 stories) were put up in the last decade. New York, the city with the most such buildings, has erected fewer than 200 in its entire history. The Shanghai skyscrapers were built in a direct response to the demand for space, associated with the ferocious reawakening of the Chinese economy—that is, to make money, responding to demand.
The old formula for what drives skyscraper construction—high density plus high land values equals high buildings—is quite undone by the new class of super-tall buildings, rising as they so often do from the wide-open spaces of unformed young cities.
By contrast, the twin Petronas Towers—which by climbing 33 feet higher than Sears took the tall-building title out of the United States in 1998—were built primarily to make visible the roar of Malaysia’s Asian Tiger (that is, to satisfy ego). The towers didn’t make a dime, and they still stand largely vacant, but now we all know that the folks in Kuala Lumpur can think big. The increasingly quixotic constructions in Kuwait or Riyadh or Dubai—such as the Babel-like Burj itself, which will house an Armani-branded hotel, boutique offices, and luxury residences—can be seen as the product of a pool of investment capital searching for a purpose and finding it, as skyscraper builders always have, in self-aggrandizement.
[Remainder of this long article is available at the link.]
I expect to see the day when most of So Fla is underwater. First heard that more than 30 years ago. Felt it was true then. Still feel it's true.
I think not.
Sadly, I think the Jihadi's are going to . . . degrade such plans.
There would also be this issue of light down below . . . not insurmountable but an issue.
And, with the world having 1/3--2/3 less people . . . I'm skeptical there will be a market.
Except I...and about 75% of the rest of the population, has NO desire to live like sardines in an arcology type environment.
This is a very strange fixation some folks have.
Architects and civil engineers ping
Lemme know if you want to be on the list.
I must admit that I am fascinated with skyscrapers. Whenever I go to a new city, the first thing I want to do is go to the tallest building and ride the elevator to the top. I want to see buildings get taller and taller. No height is too tall for me. I wouldn't mind seeing mile high buildings. Just don't ask me to clean the windows.
I'm a skyscraper fanatic too. To me, it symbolizes American ingenuity and might.
“Everyone I know flies from Dubai to Tokyo to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei,” says Carol Willis...
Me too, how about YOU...???
"Imagine at the 50-story level, having all the skyscrapers in Manhattan connected by pedestrian bridges (fully enclosed from the weather) making it possible to walk up and down Manhattan at the 50-story level."
Impossible due to structural differences causing varying "sway factors".
More likely is a series of buildings like I saw in downtown San Francisco some years ago, joined by walkways and plazas at the mezzanine level. Nice for pedestrians. No traffic worries.
I think that was one of the building plans I saw. It was tall but huge inside. A city within a city.
If I go down into my basement, and dig down another 2,000 feet, I can get to a mile high!
Interesting idea, but I think the wieght of the structures would cause them to sink.
They will be the cloud dwellers while we stay behind to mine the zenite?
(a little Star Trek humor, forgive me)
Actually, I like it. Ship the slickers upstairs and keep the rural country such as where I live pristine.
Pisa/
"1,083-foot-tall Ryugyong Tower in Pyongyang, North Korea (if its stalled construction resumes, it will be the world’s tallest hotel)'
There are pictures on the web of this. It needs to stay stalled.
They wouldn't be rigid. You put flexible and sliding joints in such as expansion joints in bridges.
Crystal City, VA.
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