A Moving Skyscraper for N.Y.?
By John Tierney
Each of the floors of the Dynamic Tower rotates independently, giving the building different shapes throughout the day. (Dynamic Architecture/ David Fisher)Would you like to see a building twisting itself into different shapes night and day on the New York skyline? Would you like to live in an apartment with a view that rotates 360 degrees? It may be a little hard at the moment to arrange financing for such tower — or any other new skyscraper in Manhattan — but the architect David Fisher is looking for a place to build it here someday.
He’s already designed such an edifice in Dubai called the Dynamic Tower, billed as the “world’s first building in motion.” Dr. Fisher, an architect based in Florence, he told me that he hopes groundbreaking for the Dubai tower will occur “within a matter of weeks,” and said that the problems in the credit market haven’t affected the project.
The tower is supposed to generate enough electricity to supply the power needs for itself as well as buildings nearby. The electricity will come from horizontal wind turbines tucked away between each of its 80 floors, and from solar photovoltaic cells on the roof each story. As the individual floors move, about 20 percent of each roof is expected to be exposed to the sun at any time of the day.
Dr. Fisher, who’s working on another of these towers for Moscow, was in town this week to discuss plans for New York. Where might it go? “We are currently looking at a few sites,” he told me. “It should be a place from where the view is attractive and also where people can stand and watch the building changing its shape.”
Any suggestions for him? Any predictions on how well those turbines and photovoltaic cells will work? And would you pay a premium to live in a room with a moving view?*************************************************************************************
Correction Appended
SHANGHAI, Oct. 16 - Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.
That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.
The changing Shanghai skyline includes Skyline Mansion, the white building at center, which will be one of the most expensive apartment buildings in the city.
An apartment complex going up in Shanghai. With mortgage rates around 5 percent, energetic foreign investment, rising income and official approval, the nation is making up for years of inattention to construction.
China's real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country's nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion.
For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.
"There's no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we've never seen before," said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. "But more importantly, it's the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years."
In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden.
Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West. "I'm working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area," said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. "Scale like that doesn't happen in the U.S."
It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways.
For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant.
A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts.
Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.
Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills.
Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China.
The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage .
China's heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world's 10 most-polluted cities.
The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists. Indeed, as the world's most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered.
China's housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990's that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940's allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing.
As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.
This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region.
"China's demand for housing is just getting going," says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai.
The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3.
"Everyone wants to build a Manhattan," said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. "In China, I say 'smaller, smaller' and the clients say 'wider, wider.' "
Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country's new real estate tycoons - people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur.
It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries.
The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People's Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.
Guohua's real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.
Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers - buildings 18 stories or higher - far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany.
Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world's biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world's tallest buildings - the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.
There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will.
And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation's economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector.
Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world's largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.
In his report, "China Eats the World," Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, "the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry."
Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle.
"You know for a half-century, nothing was built in China," Mr. Jun of Gensler said. "Now there's a lot of excitement and demand for new houses, and excitement about a new way to live."
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Beijing Air Terminal Goes All Out for the Games
The recently opened Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport was designed and completed in record time for the Summer Olympics. It can handle 50 million passengers a year.
BEIJING — Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world.
Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year. The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.
It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued the new $8.7 billion terminal at Heathrow in London, a project that took six years to complete.
This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.
While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch, China’s poor human rights record, its pollution, product safety and child labor scandals, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.
Beijing hopes to overcome these negatives, and the dark sides of its roaring economy, by emphasizing its ability to upgrade and modernize, at least when it comes to buildings and infrastructure projects. The main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.
And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television, or CCTV.
That $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two interlocking Z-shaped towers that rise 767 feet and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.
New York has the Chrysler Building, Grand Central and the Guggenheim Museum; Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center; now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.
“Beijing is a huge experimental site right now,” says Zhu Wenyi, dean of the school of architecture at Tsinghua University. “This modern architecture is the identity of modern China.”
But sometimes the sheer scale of the buildings overwhelms everything else. Thirty years after economic reforms began, this country has built a series of super structures that almost seem intended more for the Guinness Book of World Records than cityscapes.
China is home, for instance, to the world’s largest shopping mall (the seven-million-square-foot South China Mall); the longest sea-crossing bridge (it stretches 36 kilometers, or about 22 miles, over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the Three Gorges project); and the highest railway (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost 16,000 feet above sea level, the so-called roof of the world).
Late last year, Beijing opened what may be the world’s largest performance hall, the National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million concert hall, opera house and theater center even bigger than the Kennedy Center in Washington. Nicknamed The Egg, the Chinese center’s titanium dome rises above a wide reflecting pool.
For decades, the ruling Communist Party used huge building programs to lure foreign investment and to create millions of jobs. But this new wave is different.
“This is just the start,” said Ma Yansong, a 32-year-old architect who studied in the United States and runs a practice here. “The last 10 years we’ve had landmark buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. But now, the private developers are coming in, and second-tier cities want to develop.”
In recent weeks, many Chinese have complained about what they say is Western media distortions about China and its role in Tibet, where riots broke out last month.
Indeed, behind the increasingly nationalistic counterprotests is a fear that China’s Olympic moment is being overshadowed by critics and that the country’s remarkable achievements are being ignored.
Many Chinese say that will change on Aug. 8, 2008 — an auspicious date by traditional reckoning because 8 is a lucky number — as the world focuses on the Olympics and China’s undeniable accomplishments.
In Beijing, officials have used the Olympics to justify razing old neighborhoods and relocating tens of thousands of poor residents, with hopes of remaking the city into a modern capital of new highways, subway lines and gleaming skyscrapers.
Similarly, city officials in Shanghai have relocated huge factories and thousands of residents along the Huangpu River to prepare a two-square-mile site for the 2010 World Expo, Shanghai’s own coming-out.
With China rapidly urbanizing, there are now dozens of other big cities developing master plans and commissioning new skyscrapers, expressways and whole shopping districts.
In Macao, one of China’s special administrative zones, the Las Vegas-based Sands Corporation built a 10.5-million-square-foot casino, hotel and convention center, which opened last summer to huge crowds.
Not everyone, however, is pleased with the development transforming China’s cities. Old neighborhoods and important historical buildings are being demolished. Expressways and skyscrapers have erased cultural signposts. Even some leading Chinese architects and urban planners are crying foul. And all this growth depends largely on energy derived from coal, which fouls the air, distracting from China’s gleaming new palaces.
Others complain that too many foreign architects are being showcased, at the expense of China’s home-grown talent, that Chinese elements are being lost — like Beijing’s old courtyard-style homes — and that overaggressive development is littering the landscape with modern monstrosities.
“I’m completely against this big architecture; it’s a total waste,” says Yin Zhi, president of the urban planning and design institute at Tsinghua University. “The government wants to grab the Olympic opportunity to remake Beijing, spending so much money on these stupid projects. Why not use the budget to improve Beijing’s traffic system? Why not improve the quality of people’s lives?”
Professor Yin went on: “China, as a developing country, is not supposed to spend so much on these eye-catching projects. It shows in some ways that China lacks confidence.”
But Beijing seems eager to show the world it can attract world-class architects to China, and it has lured big names, including Zaha Hadid, a distinguished architect from London.
Local developers are rushing to capitalize on this moment of extreme transformation. A rising middle class and the emergence of a car culture in China are creating opportunities to build new cities and suburbs, and many cities want to prove they are fast-developing, hoping to lure even more investment.
With the economy booming, air travel has also skyrocketed, creating demand for new airports. Indeed, even after a building boom over the past decade, the government says it plans to build another 97 new airports by 2020.
Here in Beijing, the construction of Terminal 3 was accelerated to meet the surge in air travel into the capital, and to create a dazzling new gateway to the city in time for the Olympics.
Foster & Partners, the British architectural firm, won the design competition less than five years ago, in late 2003. The firm quickly set up an office here and in March 2004 began work on a 14-million-square-foot project that would eventually dwarf all five of Heathrow’s terminals combined.
The developers wanted to incorporate Chinese characteristics, so they sought the advice of a feng shui master. They selected red and gold as the dominant colors, to match those of old palaces and the Forbidden City.
Then they raced the clock.
“In November 2003, we were awarded the contract,” says Mouzhan Majidi, the lead architect on the project for Foster & Partners. “Within a week, we had to have a Foster office in Beijing.”
Siemens, the German company, built a sophisticated baggage handling system that can sort and transport 19,200 pieces of luggage an hour through the nearly two-mile-long building. Workers lifted and placed a giant roof designed to look like the scales of a dragon.
The building opened ahead of schedule, largely because Beijing had turned the site into a 24-hour-a-day operation, with tens of thousands of workers living on the airport grounds. It is the kind of operation that can be found only in China.
Beijing supplied an army of workers. “When I think back to our site visits with Norman, it was an incredible scene to see 50,000 people working on a building,” says Mr. Majidi, who works closely with Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. “It evoked what it might have been like to build the pyramids.”
Still, it may not be big enough.
In January, Beijing’s civil aviation authority announced that yet another international airport was needed in the city. Construction is expected to begin soon.******************************************
A Russian Skyscraper Plan Divides a Horizontal City
A plan for a 1,299-foot-tall building in St. Petersburg has drawn criticism in the city, where the tallest building is now just over 400 feet.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Dec. 1 — Russia’s largest company, Gazprom, announced on Friday that it had chosen the architecture firm RMJM London to design this city’s tallest building, brushing aside arguments from preservationists and residents that the project — whoever the architect — would destroy the city’s architectural harmony.
RMJM’s winning proposal includes a twisting glass tower that would anchor a business and residential center planned for a site on the Neva River opposite the Smolny Cathedral, one of the city’s most famous landmarks.
As now designed, it would rise 1,299 feet — higher even the Peter and Paul Cathedral, built 300 years ago by Peter the Great, which is just over 400 feet tall.
Gazprom’s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, hailed the project as a “new symbol of St. Petersburg” akin to city landmarks including the Admiralty, St. Isaac’s Church and the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
“This new, modern project will give birth to a new mentality for St. Petersburg, which lives in a new, modern civilization,” said Mr. Miller, appearing with the city’s governor, Valentina I. Matviyenko. “And its citizens will feel the pulse of the new economy, the pulse of the contemporary world.”
Gazprom selected the RMJM proposal over five other designs by the noted architects Jean Nouvel of Paris; Massimiliano Fuksas of Rome; the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam; and Daniel Libeskind of Berlin.
The competition stirred weeks of ferocious debate. Even as Gazprom’s executives met with city officials and experts on the selection commission at the company’s headquarters on the English Embankment, a small group of protesters passed back and forth aboard a small trawler in the Neva, dressed as clowns and mental patients and holding a sign deriding the project. “Lunatics City,” the sign said. (The project is referred to as Gazprom City.)
There was also dissension within the selection panel. The Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, who was invited to serve as a member of the jury, read a two-page statement on Friday describing his vision for St. Petersburg, which would preserve its cityscape on a lower scale, and opposing any of the projects under consideration. He then resigned from the jury and left. In a telephone interview later, he said the city’s current limit on building heights was “the most sensitive issue to keeping the existing cultural value of the old city center.”
Before the architect was chosen, the project came under attack on several fronts, and potential challenges remain.
The St. Petersburg Union of Architects, the director of the State Hermitage Museum and other preservation groups have threatened to challenge it in court. This week three members of the city’s parliament appealed to the country’s prosecutor general, saying the project would violate budget rules and a city zoning ordinance that restricts buildings in that part of the city to 157 feet.
One of the lawmakers, Mikhail I. Amosov, said on Friday that the construction of a skyscraper, as Gazprom specified when it solicited proposals, would intrude into St. Petersburg’s horizontal cityscape, which has remained largely unaltered for two centuries.
“Eventually we are going to lose the shape of St. Petersburg that we inherited from previous generations,” Mr. Amosov said after Gazprom announced the decision.
With offices throughout Britain and in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok, RMJM ranks among the world’s top 15 architecture firms in size. The St. Petersburg commission will significantly expand the firm’s presence in Russia, where it is already building a 46-story office tower in Moscow called the City Palace.
RMJM’s managing director in Britain, Tony Kettle, said in a telephone interview that the firm designed the tower with St. Petersburg’s cityscape in mind, evoking the city’s Baroque architecture, especially its punctuating spires.
“We’ve created a new spire that elegantly breaks into the sky,” he said.
Mr. Miller and Ms. Matviyenko said the decision to select RMJM had been unanimous and made no mention of Mr. Kurokawa’s resignation. Planners said that RMJM’s design had also drawn the most votes from visitors to the project’s Web site, www.gazprom-city.info.
They emphasized that while they had chosen a design, the exact details remain undecided. Philip Nikandrov, RMJM’s Moscow director, said the project’s most controversial feature — its height — could still be reconsidered.
Ms. Matviyenko, the St. Petersburg governor and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, the city’s most prominent native, strongly defended the project against its critics. She said the project’s site was outside the historic center, which is recognized by Unesco as a cultural landmark. She added that Gazprom’s willingness to build a business center for its newly acquired oil company would inject sorely needed revenue into the city, which has not enjoyed the energy-fueled boom that has transformed Moscow.
“Without big companies coming, without turning the city into a financial and economic center, we shall never have these resources,” she said, “and the unique architectural heritage in the center of the city will be quietly falling apart before our eyes.”****************************************************************************************
South Korea Joins Rush to Build Ever Taller Buildings
INCHEON, South Korea — On a stretch of reclaimed land, near where Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces came ashore during the Korean War, this city will build a towering monument to its rising ambitions: twin skyscrapers reaching 2,013 feet into the sky, higher than the tallest building in the world today.
A rendering of the Songdo Incheon Towers, part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone.
Developers in neighboring Seoul responded by increasing the height of a skyscraper they were planning by 66 feet. In December, the chief of a Seoul ward announced an even more grandiose plan to erect a 220-story building that, at almost 3,200 feet, would be twice as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Incheon and Seoul are part of one of the biggest booms in tall-building construction since the skyscraper appeared more than a century ago, a rush spreading from established tower magnets like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and Hong Kong to lesser-known cities across fast-rising East Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Awash with cash from South Korea’s economic takeoff, Incheon and Seoul are being joined in the building rush by Busan, which also plans two skyscrapers of more than 100 stories. In the Middle East, Mecca and Doha are building soaring new towers. So are a half dozen lesser-known cities in China, including Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wenzhou. Experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come from economically booming India.
“We have entered an unprecedented era of skyscraper construction,” said Daniel Kieckhefer, a senior editor at Emporis, a German research firm that tracks building projects worldwide. “Chinese cities that I’ve never heard of are building skylines that rival New York’s.”
According to Emporis, 42 skyscrapers are in the planning stages or under construction around the world that are more than 1,000 feet, a height widely regarded as “super-tall.” At least 33 super-tall buildings have been completed in the past 80 or so years, including the world’s current tallest, the 1,667-foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan, built in 2004.
Of those planned new buildings, only five will be in the United States. Three are in New York: the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot building planned for the site where the World Trade Center stood; the Bank of America Tower; and The New York Times Tower. The other two are in Chicago: the Trump International Hotel & Tower and the Waterview Tower.
Many of the world’s new super-tall buildings are rising in overcrowded cities where land is scarce, and a newly emerging middle class is clamoring for modern office and living space. But experts say the drive to go tall also reflects the aspiration of Asian and Persian Gulf nations to join the ranks of the developed world, and to assert that their long-awaited moment in history has finally come.
“Developing countries want the tallest building to put themselves on the map,” said Antony Wood, executive director of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. “They want to say to the developed world that they’ve arrived, that they now have the financial and technological ability to make these projects happen.”
In South Korea, one reason for the sudden proliferation of ambitious skyscraper plans has been a desire to keep up with its booming neighbors: China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“South Koreans were a little hurt by the fact that Taiwan has the world’s tallest building, and we don’t,” said Lee Bok-nam, a researcher at the Construction & Economy Research Institute of Korea. “If they have one, we have to have one, too.”
For now, the busiest builder remains Dubai, as the bustling port in the United Arab Emirates grows into the Persian Gulf’s financial center. The city has poured billions of its oil and banking dollars into dozens of gleaming high-rises that have sprung out of what was until recently empty desert, though the boom has been marred by labor abuses.
According to Emporis, 15 of the super-talls planned or under way are located there, including the Burj Dubai, a $1 billion, 161-story tower scheduled for completion next year that will be — at least for a while — the world’s tallest man-made structure, besting the 2,063-foot KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota.
The Burj’s Dubai-based owners hope that by not revealing the building’s height until the final spire is fitted, they will frustrate rivals’ plans to immediately outdo them. Most speculation puts the Burj’s height at about a half-mile, or 2,650 feet.
Such heights are possible because of new high-performance concretes and composite materials and advances in engineering. One of the Burj’s chief structural engineers, Ahmad K. Abdelrazaq, said that computer simulations allowed for increasingly innovative designs.
“Tall buildings are all about the technologies available,” said Mr. Abdelrazaq, an executive director at Samsung Engineering & Construction, one of the main contractors building the Burj. “Humans have always aspired to go to the highest point they can reach, and the technologies determine how high that is.”
Mr. Abdelrazaq said wind is one of the biggest challenges for super-tall buildings. The Burj has a series of platforms along its height that form a spiraling helix shape, forcing air currents harmlessly upward and preventing the formation of deadly whirlwind-like vortexes, he said.
The Taipei 101 overcomes the forces of wind and earthquakes by using a different technology, called a tuned mass damper — essentially, a 600-ton ball suspended by cables inside the building’s top. The damper acts as a huge pendulum, steadying the building when it starts to sway.
Just as the invention of the elevator made early skyscrapers feasible, faster, better elevators are crucial now. The Taipei 101’s aerodynamic, bullet-shaped elevators rise to the building’s 89th-floor observation deck in 37 seconds. Experts say in the future, tall buildings could use elevators that move on magnets instead of cables, allowing them to move sideways and diagonally.
In South Korea, the burst of economic and nationalist passion has borne proposals for a dozen super-tall buildings. Some, experts say, may never break ground, but others seem certain.
The $3 billion twin Songdo Incheon Towers will be the centerpiece of a 13,000-acre urban development, called the Songdo International City. Estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars, the project is the product of this gritty port city’s ambition to transform itself into a transportation and high-technology research hub. Incheon officials hope the towers will replace General MacArthur’s epic landing as a symbol for the city.
“All international cities have landmark towers,” said Lee Seung-joo, a senior project manager of the 151-story Incheon towers, scheduled for completion by 2013. “A landmark tower is like a brand. These towers will be Incheon’s brand to the world.”
Strong public interest here attests to South Korea’s desire for global recognition.
“A tall building means pride,” said Kim Sang-dae, a professor of architectural engineering at Korea University in Seoul. “It is a message to the world, that we are now equal to you and that we are not a poor country anymore.”
There has been little popular opposition here, even from the sorts of neighborhood preservation groups that commonly battle such projects in the United States. So far, the biggest opponent has been the Korean Air Force, which worries that the structures will block its flight paths.
Instead, attention seems to be on who gets the grandest new monument. In Seoul, the planned 151-story Yongsan Landmark Building, at 2,046 feet, will tower over all the city’s existing structures, and even some nearby mountain peaks.
“Seoul is the capital, so it must have the tallest building,” said Han Bong-seok, an executive at Korea Railroad, the national railway company, who heads the project to build the tower on the site of an old train yard. “This is for the pride of Seoul.”
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