Is it really OK? The height of skyscrapers has been limited by many factors, from zoning to the danger of having it blow over in a storm, but the owner’s modesty has rarely entered into it. The attacks on the World Trade Center did, however, make it more likely that a country other than the United States will be the first to put a building in outer space. Just as the brick towers of New York and Chicago once symbolized America’s aspirations to overtake the gable-roofed countinghouses of Europe, today’s glass and metal obelisks make a similar assertion about China and its East Asian neighbors–like Malaysia, which put its capital of Kuala Lumpur on the business map with the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers. “It’s an ego issue and a status thing,” says Hong Kong architect William Lim. “High-rises are the Pyramids of our time.” And next to money, there’s nothing dearer to a developer than status. “You’ve got three or four buildings underway in Asia that are vying to be the world’s tallest,” says Ron Klemencic, chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. “At least once a month I get a press release from one of these guys saying, ‘We’re adding floors, we’re putting on a spire’.”
Even London, which has long resisted the intrusion of tall buildings into its Financial District, has now conceded that the sky is the only place to put the 12 million square feet of new office space planners say are needed. One of the first big buildings to be built in the City since the 1970s is a 41-story office tower designed by Norman Foster, nicknamed (after its shape, not color) “the erotic gherkin.” Awaiting approval is
Renzo Piano’s 1,016-foot London Bridge Tower, which if built will be the tallest building in Europe.
The contest to succeed Petronas Towers is especially intense between Shanghai and Hong Kong, both of which have projects underway that will be about 100 stories and more than 1,500 feet tall. Shanghai to build world’s highest tower despite 9/11, boasted People’s Daily, referring to Shanghai World Financial Center, whose immense size (more than 3.3 million square feet) will reinforce its daring geometry–a square at the base, sliced away by two great arcs to a knife-edge roof. To relieve the wind pressure of the occasional typhoon, the architects designed a 164-foot cutout near the top. But the hole’s circular shape reminded some officials of the Rising Sun flag of Japan, so it had to be modified with a bridge across the bottom. Its rival in Hong Kong, Union Square, is a tapering tower that will be the centerpiece of a nearly 20 million-square-foot development built around a transit hub. This kind of intensive urbanism “is a trend everywhere except in the United States,” says Carol Willis, executive director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York City. But in Asia, says Paul Katz, a partner in Kohn Pedersen Fox, which is designing both new buildings, “by the time these are done, we’ll be planning 150-story buildings.”
Even in the United States, as the 9-11 attacks have receded, so has some of the initial concern over skyscraper safety. “Clients have asked about [making their buildings more robust],” says Klemencic, who is also a leading structural engineer. “When they found out what it would cost, there were no takers. The attitude was, ‘Let’s just meet the [building] code’.” Engineers are still debating whether the Twin Towers’ unique structure should be credited for surviving the initial crashes, or blamed for collapsing in the subsequent fires, or both. But the point is that it was unique, utilizing closely spaced columns connected to a steel core by relatively lightweight floor trusses. Tall buildings today are more commonly designed with cores of high-strength concrete, linked by big girders to massive perimeter columns. Whether or not such a building would stand up longer in a crash and fire, one would hope that its thick concrete core would better protect the exit stairs and elevators than the Twin Towers’ gypsum board.
Meanwhile, the race to the skies is being driven by mundane advances that have nothing to do with standing up to 767s, but everything to do with making buildings more profitable. Buildings taller than around 80 stories need so many elevators that the shafts tend to swallow the lower floors. But elevators can be made more efficient. “If we ran airports like we run elevators, everybody would just pile into the first airplane and tell the pilot where he was going,” says transportation engineer Kevin Huntington. In the future (and in some buildings already), passengers will punch their floors into keypads in the lobby and be directed to a specific elevator, so that people going to the same floor travel together–boosting morning rush-hour “throughput” by as much as 30 percent. The other area of progress is in energy use. Ever since the first energy crisis, engineers sought to shut out heat by covering buildings with what London architect Marco Goldschmied of the Richard Rogers Partnership calls “all those rather nasty blue and green colors we saw in the 1980s.” But new window glass achieves even better insulation without any tint at all–which in turn saves more energy on lighting. To maximize that advantage, Carl Galioto of Skidmore predicts that over the next decade office-ceiling heights will gradually increase by as much as six inches (from around nine feet now)–which, naturally, will tend to make buildings even taller.
There’s a lesson here, perhaps best summed up by the experience of Michael Whiteman, a New York restaurant consultant who helped create the original Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center, then re-created it after the towers were bombed in 1993 and saw it fall to the ground last September. In November he helped open Equinox, the world’s second highest restaurant, on floors 68 to 72 of a Singapore hotel. “A finger in your eye, Osama!” he exclaims. To aim for the sky shows the world that there’s something more powerful than hate. And that, of course, is money.
