It was built for stockbrokers and bankers in their thousand dollar suits to make million dollar deals, but for nearly two decades it has held the less impressive title of the world’s tallest squat. Welcome to the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, more commonly known as the Torre David (the Tower of David) in Caracas, Venezuela, an unfinished skyscraper which has now been colonised by an ad hoc community of over 700 families. — messynessychic.com

Winners have been announced recently at the fifth annual Mock Firms International Skyscraper Competition, organized by Chicago Architecture Today. [...]

The top title of International Skyscraper and Mock Firm Champion (a combination of architectural and marketing efforts) was awarded to the team AZAHAR Architecture composed of five architecture students and one professor from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. — bustler.net

Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture has unveiled plans for Imperial Tower, which would become Mumbai's tallest building and surely one of the world's most slender skyscrapers, should it come to be built.

The 116-story, 400-m (1,300-ft) tall residential skyscraper has a distinctive curved shape, which AS+GG says has been designed to "confuse the wind." — gizmag.com

Soundscrapers could soon turn urban noise pollution into usable energy to power cities.

An honourable mention-winning entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, dubbed Soundscraper, looked into ways to convert the ambient noise in urban centres into a renewable energy form.

Noise pollution is currently a negative element of urban life but it could soon be valued and put to good use. — DesignBuild Source

The Ping’an Finance Center is planned to top out at 660m, making it not only China’s tallest building but the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Dubai. 80m has been built so far, but construction has been halted in the wake of the revelation from Shenzhen’s Housing and Construction Bureau that substandard sea sand concrete had been used in its construction. — wired.com

Tokyo has a new skyscraper: the Japan Post Tower, a 38-story high-rise building designed by Helmut Jahn's Chicago firm in collaboration with Mitsubishi Jishu Sekkei, will hold its official grand opening for all commercial space Friday, March 21, 2013. — bustler.net

Our friends at eVolo Magazine just announced the winners of the 2013 Skyscraper Competition. The annual award, established in 2006, recognizes design visions that rethink the conventions of vertical living and the use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations. [...]

The winners were selected for their creativity, ingenuity, and understanding of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities. — bustler.net

Viennese practice Söhne & Partner Architekten has shared with us their competition entry for the new United Bank building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The tower design with the dragon-scale facade was conceived in collaboration with Ethiopian firm BET Architects. — bustler.net

A proposal for two skyscrapers that would flank the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood gained the approval of the city's planning department Tuesday despite push-back from dozens of disgruntled residents.

The Millennium Hollywood plans are the most ambitious in a string of revitalization projects in the area, including the W Hotel and the Hollywood & Highland Center. The $664-million mixed-use development could include more than 1 million square feet of apartment, office and retail space. — latimes.com

Reaching 637 feet, the tower features a faceted facade filled with 428 residential units. Last month the creative team at Selldorf posted a video showing the louvered façade system, a "second skin" controlled by each individual dweller, and described thusly: "Cloaking the façade, a system of operable terracotta louvers animates the building with its changing configurations and reflectivity." — Curbed NY

The Swiss practice is one of three that have been commissioned by Canary Wharf Group to design the first phase of the Wood Wharf development.

Allies & Morrison has been appointed to design two new office buildings which will sit either side of the western end of the high street. The offices, aimed at IT services and new media companies, will sit above two storeys of retail. — bdonline.co.uk

Canada’s biggest city is getting even bigger, with a pace-setting number of skyscrapers set to join the city skyline.

According to a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) report dubbed “Canada Rising,” Toronto is leading the western world in terms of new buildings 150 metres or taller currently under construction. — DesignBuild Source Canada

The skyline of Chile’s capital city, Santiago, has a new addition with the Gran Torre skyscraper casting a two-kilometre shadow across the historic city.

The 70-storey residential building stands more than 300 metres tall, making it the tallest building in South America. The five-ton steel structure cost an estimated one billion dollars to build and tenants are expected to move into the building next March. — DesignBuild Source

Hadid’s tower will be built at the site that is now occupied by the BP Station at 1000 Biscayne Boulevard, directly across from Museum Park. The selection of Hadid was confirmed Monday by the investment group behind 1000 Biscayne Tower, which is managed by local developers Gregg Covin and Louis Birdman. — miamiherald.com

Encountered on the street, they are enigmatic and shifting, even voluptuous. They appear carefully controlled, but their underlying geometry is far from obvious. Driving or walking by causes the towers' profiles to change continuously, and it would require significant mental acrobatics to map the relationship between profiles and construct a complete mental model of the building. From a closer vantage point, the geometric enigma remains, but a feature at another scale begins to dominate. — domusweb.it