How High Will They Build?

It was technically feasible, he said, but for the elevator problem. More recently, Tokyo mulled plans for Sky City 1,000 (3,281 feet, or 1,000 meters) and something called Mother (4,333 feet). Sir Norman Foster has sketched a pair of Millennium Towers: the 2,755-foot Tokyo version and another at 2,952 feet in Shanghai. (Foster's proposal for a tower at New York's WTC site would be, he said, "the tallest, the strongest, the greenest and the safest" ever built.) A pair of Bionic Towers proposed for Shanghai and Hong Kong by the firm Cervera & Pioz and Partners are each envisioned as a central 300-story skyscraper surrounded by a cluster of smaller buildings, a self-contained city with shops, apartments, cinemas and workspace for 100,000 people. This is offered as a response to the "superpopulation" problems of the future. The cost would be stratospheric -- more than $14 billion, according to Chinese media. Pure fantasy? "We are considering it," a Shanghai official told me during a recent visit to his planning office.



"But who wants to live in a building 1 mile high?" asks Mir M. Ali, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois and author of Art of the Skyscraper. He points to the claustrophobic social conditions of such a skyscraper, plus the diminishing pleasure of views when you are literally in the clouds. A more realistic height for the 21st century, he believes, is around 150 stories and 2,000 feet.



Architects like Pelli have already designed such towers. Likewise SOM's Smith and KPF's Kohn. All three were for Chicago. "Humanity has an obsession with building big," says Pelli, whose Two International Finance Center will soon become Hong Kong's tallest tower. "Part of it is the human element. That's why a tall TV tower isn't so important. When we see humans in a building, and know there are eyes up there, that's the emotional connection. Tall has power."





Ron Gluckman, who writes for Time, Newsweek and Travel & Leisure, has been based in Asia for 13 years. He loves tall buildings but is scared of heights.