How High Will They Build?

Already there is talk of America reclaiming the crown, with several of the recent proposals for the World Trade Center site in Manhattan involving world-beating towers and structures. True, local economics, site-use concerns and, no doubt, fear mean those towers are unlikely to be built as high as proposed. But America isn't where the race has been happening anyway. Petronas wasn't an aberration; it signaled a new boom. If the 1930s were marked by the superb Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, and the 1970s by the businesslike Sears and WTC, then this 10 or 15 years -- mid '90s to, say, 2010 -- marks the era of the Far East. Seven of the world's 10 tallest buildings were completed in the late '90s; eight of the top 10 are in Asia; Kuala Lumpur will pass the crown to Taipei later this year, and Taipei, likely, to Shanghai later this decade. Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo are also in the race. There's no sign that terrorism, even post-Bali, will slow this down; some designers claim Asian towers are safer than the WTC was anyway.



Why the race? To be blunt, in Asia today, as in New York 70 years ago, nothing is more demonstrative than a huge, well, upright symbol. Rival nations and corporations work overtime to show they are high-tech powerhouses. "Height, as a manifestation of technology, is tied up with cultural aspirations," says Eric Howeler, an architect with KPF, which is designing Union Square, a 108-story building that will, Howeler says, be the world's tallest when completed in 2007. "This is true for relatively low-tech items like base building structure -- steel or concrete -- all the way to high-tech items like lifting, damping, signage, lighting." Thus architects perch an 800-ton damping ball near the top of a 101-story building to counter sway caused by winds
in a typhoon region. Pressurized and double-decker elevators tackle the problem of speedily moving many people. Cold cathode fixtures and fiber-optic strands are incorporated into curtain walls to turn buildings into billboards for technology. And much is done with materials and building strategies to speed the construction process along.