Whether it’s driven by economics or our innate need to defy gravity and make the skyline our own, the skyscraper is standing taller than ever.
New York has plans for the Freedom Tower, which at 1,776 feet would be more than 400 feet taller than the World Trade Center. And just a few weeks ago, Chicago developer Christopher Carley showed off his plans for a twisting, 2,000-foot tower. For something even taller, go to Dubai, where a mixed-use tower should be ready in 2008. As planned, it will reach close to a half-mile into the sky.
All three are set to outdo Taipei Financial Center’s building, which stands as the world’s tallest.
“There are more projects going on now that are in the race to be the tallest building,” says Jon Pickard of Pickard Chilton Architects in New Haven, Conn. Pickard was one of the designers of the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. From 1998 to 2004, they stood as the world’s tallest structures.
Competition in the skyscraper derby has become so fierce that developers often won’t reveal how high they plan to build. Doing so, they figure, might prompt rivals to add a floor or two to their own proposals and come out on top.
Why now? In the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks leveled the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York, the skyscraper seemed to have run its course. Many figured the tragedy of that day heralded a new age that no longer had room for super-tall structures.
Architects say the public’s fear of heights lasted six months or so before business went back to usual. Fred Clarke, another New Haven architect who worked on the Petronas Towers (New Haven architects designed much of the Malaysian capital’s recent development), says the attack on the World Trade Center actually helped spur the recent spate of skyscraper plans.
“There’s the attempt to demonstrate that we are better than 9/11,” he says. “I think it’s taken on more than economic concerns.”
And why not? Skyscrapers have long been a symbol of national pride.
As Asian countries gain greater economic might, their many new high-rises validate their place in the new globalization.
Even before Sept. 11, talk had been that very tall buildings were an architectural anachronism. The wired age was going to free workers from having to work together in one building. With Internet and e-mail, the thinking went, employees could work from home.
That hasn’t happened.
“You could (work from home), but we’re human beings, and human beings want to interact,” says Bill Chilton, Pickard’s partner.
Even places long resistant to skyscrapers, such as London, are reconsidering. Besides being ostentatious, skyscrapers would ruin a skyline defined by Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral, many figured. But numerous tall buildings are in the works there.
“The London skyline in five years is going to be very different,” says Lynn Osmond, president of the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
Even when the economy doesn’t warrant such projects, Clarke says, very tall buildings make us feel better about ourselves.
“Skyscrapers go through some important impulse in mankind, and that is to build high,” he says. “That has always been in our psyche, well before we knew how. There’s always been the instinct to connect the Earth to the heavens.”
